How to handle or shot Dark subjects

Because the light meter in your camera is set to record whatever it measures as a medium tone (18% gray to be exact), dark subjects sometimes become overexposed in an effort to lighten up the midtones. To compensate for this, you can either use exposure compensation or switch to spot metering, if your camera supports it.

Most cameras have the ability to lock exposure information and let you recompose before capturing the photo. This is often done in Single Shot Focus mode by simply focusing on a subject and keeping the shutter pressed halfway while you recompose.

Dark images can be overexposed by the typical meter, like this example shows. As you can see, the black areas are more of a gray tone due to the meter trying to make this area a midtone.

However, 1 2/3 stop exposure compensation is used to keep the rich blacks in the original subject in the following example..