Windows offer a great opportunity for a magical type of look. I do this a lot with wedding dresses. Yesterday I was taking some pictures of my good friend Warren’s new Dental Office and thought this would be a good demonstration.
When shooting in Av mode, with my exposure compensation bracket at zero. The camera attempts to expose for the brightest light in the frame (evaluative metering), so in turn, the trees outside are exposed properly and everything in the dentist’s room is dark.
Image below is at 3.5 with a shutter speed of 1/1000. 
To take advantage of this, switch to manual, and while keeping the aperture at 3.5 (or whatever) slow your shutter speed down, in this case to 1/60. The result is the highlights (window and lights) are blown out, and the room is now properly exposed. We dont even have to worry about the trees now because we have exposed them right out of the picture. 
Here is an example of doing it with a wedding dress:
It’s another neat handy trick- Overexposing window light.
Yay tips and tricks! Thanks so much for these little items. They are great tools to have at one’s disposal. One of the frustrations of not knowing nothing about nothing is…you often can see the potential for an image, but you sometimes don’t know what steps to take to capture it. Backlighting is one of the trickiest areas if you ask me.
Thanks for the tip. There are a lot of pictures I have tried to make that turn out like the first one here. One question. How do you go about finding the right shutter speed to properly expose the room? You mention 60 but I would assume that isn’t a constant. Do you just snap a few until you get an exposure you like or is there some method to follow? By the way love the blog, been reading for some time now.
hi Jeff- Yes, that is right, just work your way down until you get it right. With experience it will get easier, but just switch it to manual, go double the shutter speed for starters and go from there. Thanks for reading the blog, I appreciate hearing from you.
Wow! It looks like you turned the lights on for the second photo, but they were on in the first photo. Amazing.
I remember you did this at the last wedding Michael, and it made a world of difference in the shot!
Great lesson!
Man I need to get a camera where I can control the settings, it’s quite frustrating with my little camera…what beautiful pictures!