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When using my D7000 I often have the feeling that it overexposes by 1/3 or even more, on the P programme - it also depends on the lens. Is it just me? Or am I doing something wrong?
EDIT: Exposure seems to be taken from the whole frame (which is what I expect).
Example (from Bruges)
Your photo does not look overexposed to me. Sure, the sky is blown. But the water at the bottom is already black. And the church looks just right, which is probably what you focused on. The D7000 takes the point of focus into account when metering. Try using AF-S with a single focus point on a scene with brighter and darker elements. The photo will be exposed differently depending on what you focused on.
If the camera had reduced the exposure to make the sky come out just right, the buildings would have been way too dark. If that's what you wanted (perhaps to add some fill light in Lightroom later), either point the camera to the sky, hold down AEL, recompose, and shoot. Or, dial in negative exposure compensation.
The D7000 can adjust aperture and shutter speed in 1/3 EV steps. In auto ISO mode, it can adjust ISO in 1/6 EV steps. If auto-exposure gets it within 1/3 EV of what I wanted, I'd consider that an excellent result.
That said, I do find that in bright sunny conditions, my D7000 often exposes my photos more than I'd like. My solution is to set the drive dial to H and to set bracketing to take one photo as metered and one with -2/3 EV (hold down the BKT button and use the two dials to dial in -2 and 0.7). The D7000 then rapidly takes two shots for each (sufficiently long) press of the shutter button. When importing my photos, I'll choose one from each pair.
There is actually a benefit to brightly exposing photos. The brighter parts of the photo have less noise. In bright conditions where you can increase exposure without increasing ISO or using too slow a shutter speed (subject movement), you're better off with a picture that's too bright (as long as you're not blowing too many highlights) than one that is too dark. Making a picture brighter in post increases noise, but making it darker does not.
1/3 of a stop over or under exposure isn't really very much. It corresponds to a shutter speed of 1/125 instead of 1/100. When I process raw files I routinely have to correct by more than a stop. Auto metering just isn't that accurate as it doesn't know the colour of objects in your scene, or the intended 'look' of the image.
My suggestion would be to shoot in Av mode, chose your aperture based on DOF requirements and level of light and dial in a little exposure compensation if it's consistently overexposing. Disclaimer I'm not a Nikon shooter but I assume the d7000 supports EC.
Have you checked that you haven't bumped the exposure compensation button? That can force under and overexposure without you realizing.
One thing to look at is the metering mode you are using and make sure the one selected fits with your composition. There are three modes on the D7000 which alter the way the light in the scene is evaluated when calculating shutter speed and aperture. Also for some unusual compositions there will be natural miscalculation where you will need to manually apply exposure compensation. If you are sure that the settings look good for the scene and the exposure is consistently incorrect it may be that the camera body needs recalibration, my advice would be to set up some simple test shots that the camera should have no problem with, check your settings and then see what results you get in P but also in S and A modes, this will at least tell you if the hardware is ok. If its only in P mode that you get the issue S and A being ok this would tend to suggest that the camera is ok and its user error.
Looking at your example the scene has a very large dynamic range with a bright sky and dark water. In order to capture all of this you would need to use HDR or some other similar technique or use exposure compensation to lighten up the dark lower third at the expense of completely over exposing the sky. The only way to get the shot 100% in a single image would be to use a graduated ND filter to darken down the sky.
