+2 +1 0 -1 -2 on a Camera Dial.?

Question

What do these numbers do? What is their purpose. I know that they do NOT represent ISO.

Well YOU have asked and I have listened. I am reffering to the dial on the same side as the dial that adjusts the I.S.O.. The camera in question is a manual focus Minolta X-700. Thanks folks.

Answer 1

It looks to me like these are exposure compensation numbers. Zero will expose as the camera sees fit. Moving to plus 1 will increase exposure one stop and -1 will decrease exposure one stop. It can also be done manually if you have a camera capable of manual settings. This is just a quicker way of doing it. It's also called bracketing your exposure if you are in a situation that could fool the cameras light meter.

Answer 2

It's called "ev" and it allows you to override the exposre that that camera's built-in light meter calculates as the best exposure.

You may want to adjust this for a few different reasons:

The camera's built in light meter consistently over or under exposes pictures

You are shooting in a difficult situation (for example backlit subjects, low light, bright sunlight, etc.) Using this will depend on your camera and how the light meter works in different types of light. The only way to really know is to start at 0 and then look at the pics. If they are washed out (i.e. too bright) try lowering the ev to -1. If they are too dark and don't have much contrast then increase the ev to +1. Go higher or lower as needed.

One thing thing to keep in mind...

You can bring back detail in under exposed pictures but if you over expose and "blow out" the pixels (completely white) there is no data there for your image processing program to work with so you are stuck with a big white spot in the photo.

You also want to keep the exposres predominatly above the mid-point in the historgram (see below) as there are more data points that represent light levels above the mid-point. But The trick is to not overexpose and blow out pixels.

Use the historgram in your camera if it has it. to deterime how your photos are exposed. It's the best way to determine that you got a properly exposed photo. If not most image editing programs have a histogram function to determine exposure.

See here for more information:

http://www.nikonians.org/html/resources/guides/digital/histogram_101/index.html

Answer 3

it is an exposure override.
setting +1 gives more light -1 gives less light.
by varying the exposure one stop smaller or one stop larger.
or 2
usually it can be used in any mode - auto, aperture shutter programmed.

Answer 4

They let you compensate for light or lack of light. Set it to +2 if it's really bright, and the camera adjusts accordingly to allow less light in. Set it to -2 and the reverse happens. I'm not sure exactly how this happens, probably some subtle filters set into the camera's body, but it works.

Answer 5

ev settings
brightens or darkens the picture