i know this is dumb but.....

[steve garza]

can anyone give me a detailed explanation of the exposure compensation function thereby alleviating my unfounded fear of using it?

 

[Pherdinand]

steve, although i don't know the contax g itself, but these buttons on autoexposure cameras are for overruling the decision of the light meter.
Say the meter sets a sh speed of 1/250 at aperture f/16 because you have a strong lightsource like the setting sun (what a disgusting example!) in the frame. But you don't want the strong lightsource well-exposed and the rest underexposed, right? So you override the meter's decision by "exposure compensation" of say, one stop over (one stop plus). That is, 1/125 and f/16.

Same idea with negative (under) exposure compensation, just the other way around.

 

[iggers]

For example, you are photographing someone with a window behind her. You want her face properly exposed. If you allow the meter to set the exposure, the light from the window behind her will dominate the meter's determination of the exposure. As a result your subject's face will be very dark, overexposed. So you press the button, and the exposure is adjusted by one stop or one and a half stops, to let more light through.

 

[steve garza]

iggers,
thank you for the concrete examples. I can think of several situations where I could've used the feature... You have helped!

 

[Little Prince]

Here's another (although not often useful) example. If you have a metered camera and the ASA dial goes to only 1600, say, and you want to shoot Delta 3200 at 3200. So you could set ASA to 1600 and dial in -1 exposure compensation. Now you have effectively given one stop less exposure than you would for 1600 ASA film, ie., you have rated it at 3200.

 

[Socke]

And another valuable function of the exposure compensation is for TTL-fill flash.
When you use a TLA flash you can set exposure manualy and vary the flash output +- 2 stops. Very handy for my usualy dark skinned subjects 🙂