No, it’s not winter yet. But when the ground is covered in snow (does that still happen these days?), the light meter in our cameras gets easily confused (well, if it were human, anyway). Therefor the featured image is a good example to illustrate why the light metering sometimes does not work correctly and the images are darker or brighter than we expect them to be.
Typically, if you don’t override the light meter, the result would be somehow like this:

This image is way to dark and the snow is grey and not white, as it should be.
So, what’s wrong with the light meter?
The good news is: nothing is wrong with the light meter. It works just as it is supposed to. However, the built-in light meter measures the light reflected from the subject. And that’s the problem. Snow reflects a lot of light. But the light meter does not “know” that the motif consist mainly of white. It is calibrated for subjects that are an even good mixture of dark and light which essentially is a medium grey. Whenever that is the case the picture will be exposed correctly. If, on the other hand, the subject is mostly white (or very bright), then the image will be too dark. If the subject is mostly black or very dark the image well be too bright. You can try this yourself: Set your camera to fully automatic mode and take a picture of a white cardbord or a piece of paper. Make sure have only the paper in the frame. The resulting image will be, you guessed it by now, medium grey.
Is there a better way to measure the light intensity?
Yes, there is. It’s called incident light metering. Instead of measuring the light that is reflected from the subject it is possible to measure the brightness of the light source, be it the sun or any other light source. This removes the light reflecting characteristics of the subject from the equation and the exposure of the image will allways be correct. The following illustration shows the difference between reflected light and incident light metering.

Incident light metering always works correctly, but, alas, you need an hand-held light meter. You can’t do it with your camera.
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