Exposing for the Highlights

[Canonboi]

Mods, spank me in the backside if this is not the right place to post this question but how do I really expose for the highlight? Does that mean, say I'm on a location shoot, in the farm, or in my case here in Dubai, in the desert, should I base my metering or exposure on the sun directly? Because that's where the highlight is coming from, right? But once I do that, I end up with really dark images. I mean, I can't make out anything from the term "exposing for the highlight" but that.

Or should I just base my exposure on the brightest part of my subject and THAT'S the correct meaning of this term? I've been trying this for a week now and I still can't figure out how to expose for the highlights. Always ends up with underexposed images. Please explain.

[wulf]

So, a technique question then?

Exposing for the highlights means picking settings that ensure the brightest parts of the scene are not blown out. Often you have to make exceptions for small areas of extreme brightness so that could be reworded as "getting the resulting image as bright as possible without losing important detail to blown highlights".

Wulf