Exposure is always open to interpretation! The camera can try to anticipate the kind of picture you want, and this is what Nikon’s Matrix metering and Scene Recognition System are designed for, but so much depends on the scene, contrast range, which part of the picture is the subject, and, above all, how you want it to look – so you can’t always rely on the camera to guess correctly. There is another issue with light meters in cameras. They can only measure the light reflected from the subject, so they will be fooled by unusually dark or light-toned subjects. Sometimes you may need to take over.
Manual mode puts you in complete control of the shutter speed and aperture settings.
1 MANUAL MODE