How do you meter and expose night scenes without overexposing them?

Question

When I photograph at night, my camera’s automatic metering often makes the scene too bright. I understand that the meter tends to average the scene toward a mid-tone, but for nighttime images I usually want the scene to stay dark while preserving important highlights and subject detail.

What’s the best way to meter and expose night scenes? Should I use manual exposure, spot metering, exposure lock, or exposure compensation? How do photographers usually handle this in low light?

user4262 · Accepted Answer

In my experience my camera metering will overexpose everything once it gets darker.

There are a number of things you can do about that:

Make sure the meter is looking at the part of the scene that you're most interested in, not the whole scene. To do that, switch your camera to the spot-metering mode, so that the meter only looks at a small part of the scene.
Learn to use your camera's exposure lock feature. Typically, the spot metering mode reads the exposure at the viewfinder's center spot; if you want to meter from some other part of the view, a good way to do it is to put the center spot on that part of the scene, lock in the exposure, and then recompose the shot.
Use exposure compensation. When you're using the "evaluative" or "matrix" metering mode to read the whole scene, your camera tries to adjust the exposure so that the average exposure falls within an acceptable range. Nighttime shots tend to have large dark areas, and your camera tries to compensate for those by increasing the exposure. The result is that the areas you care about become overexposed. Exposure compensation lets you tell the metering system to reduce (or increase) the overall exposure. It's like you telling the camera "I know this is a dark scene, that's what I want, so please don't try to compensate so much."
Shoot in manual mode. You can still use the meter in manual mode to help you determine what the right exposure should be, but you're also free to ignore it. This frees you from having to AE lock, and you don't have to think about how the metering system will interpret the scene. It's very common to take a number of shots in the same lighting conditions, and at those times you can take a few test shots to get the exposure dialed in the way you want it and then just leave it alone.

Shot #18, where an in-focus woman in a black leather jacket is silhouetted against an out-of-focus bright crowd, is a good example of how the camera's metering controls can help you get a great shot that simple evaluative metering and automatic exposure would never create by themselves. The woman creates a large dark area right in the center of the image. She's not really underexposed, she's just exposed the way the photographer wanted. That shot could have been taken in manual mode using the spot meter to help the photographer check the exposure level of both the woman and the crowd. Or it could have been taken in an automatic mode using the spot meter and AE lock to get the crowd exposure right. Or it could have been taken in AE mode metering just the woman, but using exposure compensation to dial down the exposure level.

How do you meter and expose night scenes without overexposing them?

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