Guessing shutter speed settings

[SCraig]

But still... Let me rephrase the question.
Sometimes pictures taken with one of the semi-automatic modes seem underexposed to me. I guess I can use exposure compensation, or shoot in manual mode... but than I come back to my original question - how to adjust it if I cannot really tell from the image on the camera screen is the exposure is right or not?

Somebody mentioned the histogram... is there a tutorial I can read which explains how to read it ?

Start with These Tutorials. If you go through them, especially the two on metering and exposure, all of your questions will be answered.

The reason you aren't getting what you expect in ANY mode, regardless of what it is, is because the exposure is off. If you are shooting in an automatic mode then it's because the camera meter misread the scene. They aren't infallible and it happens all the time.

There are typically three metering modes; spot, center-weighted, and matrix (Canon may call them something else, those are Nikon's names). Matrix mode averages everything in the scene to 18% gray. A relatively high percentage of light or dark area in the scene will completely fool the meter. Center-weighted mode averages the entire scene however it puts more emphasis on the center of the view. Spot mode reads only a small portion of the scene and bases the exposure on that. You can meter a small section of the scene for the exposure and then lock the camera to that exposure value using auto-exposure lock (again, the Nikon name).

 

[moshepupkin]

Thanks for the suggestion. Looks like I have some reading material for the weekend.