Hands In View Finder

... you're photographing a back-lit subject.

Your camera reads the predominate lighting field or the lighting in the center of the picture, to set the picture exposure. However, you may want the viewer to focus on another part of the picture; most good photographs depict the subject off-center.

And even if the subject were in the center, the camera's electronic eye may be looking at his or her coat, which doesn't bode well for the development of flesh tones.

Therefore: Train the camera lens on your own hand and set the f-stop (or the speed, or both) accordingly.

The camera will be set to pick up good flesh tones in reasonable range of the camera, and will white out overpowering backgrounds instead of letting them dominate the overall tones and contrast of the picture.

Not to be confused with HandsInView :-)

This is a good tip, as well as an amusing title for a page.

A lot of these multi-zone-matrix-auto-exposure whatchamajigs are TooCleverToBeUseful?. What you want is a spot-meter, prefereably one modified by (or in the style of) Zone VI

Of course, not everyone is the same color. Or is bringing this up just a naive liberal AmericanCulturalAssumption? For those building software the lesson is even the clever work-around may not solve all problems - and yes, the automatic exposure cameras often give bad exposures. Also the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (a fun bunch if there ever was one) guidelines for submitting photographs has advice on getting good pictures of persons with different skin coloration.

Apparently, the adult male (I don't know why sex should make a difference) Japanese skin-tone is close enough to 12% to be useful in this sort of situation.

For those building software the lesson is even the clever work-around may not solve all problems

And that DoOneThingWell? tools can be more effective that kitchen sinks.