Manual or auto?

[RyanLilly]

It's all about metering. The camera's meter will always try to give you exposure for 18% grey...so if you have a scene that is white snow...is would come out grey. If you had a dark scene...it would also come out grey.
As the photographer, we need to realize that the meter is doing this and we should compensate for it, to get more accurate results.

Using spot metering does help a lot with this though, just meter and recompose.