I personally remember the days of black and white film. That time we were instructed to “expose for the shadows, develop for the highlights” to make the ideal negative. With positive color films, we would expose to hold detail in the highlights, and let the shadows fall where they may. But in the current digital format just getting the exposure “between the uprights” of the histogram may not be enough. The sea of change in exposure methodology now is intended to place as much data within the RAW/NEF file as is possible.
In linear digital capture, the brightest stop of highlight data contains half of all the information contained in the entire image. The next stop represents half the remaining information and so on. The issue is not about overexposure but that a file has the greatest chance to reproduce detail if the information is justified closest to the highlight side of the RAW/NEF file. Despite all the recovery that can be done in postproduction, you can make it remarkably better.
Thus, the current mantra for the new ideology is Expose to the Right, placing the highlight point of the histogram (without clipping the highlights) by adjusting the camera exposure value to maximize file information.
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