> Also, beach scenes. Snow scenes. Cameras and film often (counterintuitively) underexposed those. The snow being under-exposed is the camera is trying to bala

> Also, beach scenes. Snow scenes. Cameras and film often (counterintuitively) underexposed those. The snow being under-exposed is the camera is trying to balance out the image to 18% grey [usually]. This means in a scene with mainly bright white snow it will expose to make the scene grey, unless you override it. The camera can't [with current technology as far as I know] know that you are shooting snow. If you're shooting in snow then you probably want to adjust exposure by +2 as a starting point. Photographers used to carry around a physical grey card and would use that to take a light meter reading from. That would give the base standard exposure for the ambient light so the scene should be correctly exposed. [ it's more complex due to dynamic range etc but that covers the basics ]