Originally posted by ffking It depends a bit on the type of photography, I suppose - for landscape on a tripod, I use the histogram on manual, which is a sort of shot by shot decision making - but if you 'expose to the right' but avoid clipping, you'll usually 'underexpose' scenes with bright highlights and 'overexpose' less contrasty and darker scenes. for walkabout stuff, I usually rely on the meter and accept the results. You wouldn't normally want to shoot dark subjects against a bright background (many BIF) with a minus EV, either
You mean a backlit subject? I would think underexposing could be useful there as well, giving you the option to have a silhouette or the dark object exposed correctly when you do post-processing.
I never cease to be amazed at how much you can bring out the shadows in post with RAW files.
But if you over-expose, sometimes the jpeg engine gets the best result