Face First

Often I find myself taking photos of friends on a sunny day. If my camera is set to any of the auto or semi-auto modes (aperture or shutter priority), their faces appear too dark. The reason this happens is because the camera is trying to balance a bright background with what is usually a darker face (especially if the person is wearing a hat). Let's say I'm taking candid shots and don't want to shoot with flash and I don't want to ask them to move to a different spot. What do I do? I set the camera to manual exposure mode and spot metering (I use this setting 99% of the time anyway) and I just meter for their face. I largely ignore the fact that the background will be extremely overexposed, because most of the time I only care about their face. You can't always do this, for example when you want to make sure that something important in the background is visible behind your subject, but most of the time I find that I only care about the subject's expression.