I agree the R-D1's meter is aggressively oriented towards underexposure to protect highlights. I have done grey card tests on my camera comparing the camera's meter to handheld incident and spot meters and found approximately -0.7EV underexposure, in daylight, by the R-D1. The underexposure increases to approximately -1.0EV in a typical interior tungsten environment. The R-D1's meter exposed my grey card approximately -0.3EV on the histogram compared to daylight.
Despite the R-D1's meter bias, the amount of exposure compensation you should use depends on several factors. As previously mentioned, the R-D1 does not have a typical metering pattern. Rich Cutler's invaluable R-D1 website provides a diagram of the camera's metering pattern. When shooting landscape orientation, one needs to be very aware of the lower left quadrant of the frame and how close that region averages to a medium tone. If this area averages towards bright tones, relative to the rest of the frame, positive exposure compensation will need to be added. Not unusually, you might need to add +1.0EV to +1.5EV to reach optimum exposure.
Another highly influential factor is contrast. How bright are the highlights relative to the overall frame? A low contrast image can handle aggressive positive exposure compensation much better than a high contrast image. Be careful of just automatically setting the R-D1 to +0.7EV exposure compensation. In an environment with very bright highlights, this approach can easily lead to a blown histogram. Many times +0.3 or even no compensation is the best exposure option.
If you are shooting Raw, the exposure should be biased towards being as bright as possible without overexposing the highlights. 75% of a raw image’s exposure levels exist in the camera’s two brightest stops. Ideally, the R-D1’s histogram should show information in the two brightest sections on the right. Be careful of how far your image extends into the brightest far right section of the histogram. Depending on the raw converter, this area can lead to overexposure.
The best approach to mastering the R-D1’s meter is to ignore subject matter and artistic merit, and just spend time taking practice photos solely for judging exposure. Look at the viewfinder, make an exposure judgment, take a photo, and then see how close you came to optimum exposure. Then load the images into your raw converter of choice and compare its histograms to the R-D1, being especially mindful of the highlight readings at your default raw converter settings. Many raw converters add contrast, producing brighter highlights than indicated on the R-D1. Learn where the best maximum exposure line is on your camera relative to your raw converter. Additionally, you can adjust the R-D1’s raw histogram rendering, to better match your raw converter, by adjusting the camera’s contrast and saturation settings. The “raw” histogram is really a measurement of a linear conversion of the image, controlled by the R-D1’s film settings. These settings never change the actual raw image but do affect the camera’s internal raw conversion renderings that produce the histogram. A word of caution, these settings do affect the JPEG produce by the Raw+JPEG option.
