Using Exposure Compensation at Weddings

If you shoot weddings one skill that you need to master is exposure compensation. There’s a good reason for this as you will generally find yourself shooting in many different lighting conditions. Ambient light, window light, door light, flash light are all factors to consider – when people exit or enter buildings you will have to manage your exposure and not rely on the camera.

There are a number of ways to achieve this – the first of which is to use fill flash, but you could also use centre weighted or spot metering. However if you try the last two methods you have to fiddle around with your gear wasting valuable seconds so for me a flash with -2 exposure compensation does the trick in providing light to the ‘silhouetted’ subject.

Shooting in RAW obviously adds greater flexibility in drawing out the shadows or hiding the blown highlights but you lose a lot of detail and clarity.

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