The one thing guaranteed to send shivers down the spine of many who pick up a decent camera is the ‘confusion’ of dials and controls; yet you don’t need to sport a beard and smoke a pipe to understand what they do.
A very simple explanation is that light enters the lens, passes through a shutter – the bit that opens and closes very rapidly - and records an impression on to the film or CCD/CMOS sensor (the electronic version of film). The more light that hits the film or sensor, the lighter the exposure will be. Too much light and this is called over-exposure; too little light results in under-exposure. For a sensor or film to be correctly exposed there is an exact amount of light that’s needed, and this amount of light is identical each time – unless the objective is to deliberately over-expose or under-expose for creative reasons. The camera’s light meter tells you how much light is needed to make a correct exposure and the photographer just needs to know how to interpret that information so that he can set the dials to make the picture the way he/she desires…
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