A LESSON ON EXPOSURE
(or how to not fight your exposure meter)

When I find lighting situations with high contrast, rather than worry about how I'm going to properly handle the wide range of "stops" within the scene, I take advantage of the wide range to give me more artistic images. I don't try to replicate life, but interpret it.

For this image, instead of using my matrix metering (which would have "flattened" out the lighting and color), I spot metered off the foreground flowers, then bracketed around that reading in order to get that "in your face" color with a subdued backgrond. If I were a painter, this is the effect, the feeling, I would want to convey. This image is on my website. Enjoy.

I call this "Out of The Shadows."