A typical exposure problem involves a shot of a person standing in front of a window. In real life, your eye can take in the brightness differences of the subject (fairly dark) and the outside stuff you see through the window (really bright). But even the most expensive camera often fails when it tries to shoot this scene. Typically, the camera's automatic exposure control is fooled by the bright window and thinks "Hey, this is an outside scene; it’s really bright" and then reduces the amount of light going into the camera. The unfortunate result: it scales back the incoming light so much, it can’t get a good picture of the person, and so he is now seen in a silhouette.

The solution to this common situation is to manually adjust the exposure to let more light in. With some cameras, you can precisely adjust the exposure (via the f-stop setting)... cheaper camcorders just have a button called "backlight." Either way, increasing the amount of light entering the lens means the camera will get a much better shot of the subject--although everything in the window will now be overexposed.

Solution "B" is to get away from the window.