I have had so little success with getting good pictures on these grey Wisconsin days so this morning I thought I would try something different. I used Shutter priority, flash and a high exposure comp. The BG on this image is actually snow so you can see how dark it was.
Nikon D40
Lens: VR 150-500mm F/5-6.3 G
Focal Length: 500mm
Exposure Mode: Shutter Priority
Metering Mode: Center-Weighted
1/500 sec - F/6.3
Exposure Comp.: 5.0 EV
Sensitivity: ISO 200
White Balance: Auto
AF Mode: AF-C
Flash Mode: Built-in, i-TTL-BL
Last edited by Mark Schack; 02-03-2009 at 01:11 PM.
your exposure comp is way off here. that's gotta be -5 where it should have been maybe -1.7ish. it's way underexposed, mark. cant think of any situation shooting birds when you would be more than -2EV. maybe -2.3?
Hmmm, I am obviously learning about EC. My manual says, "adjust exposure from the value metered by the camera making the entire frame brighter or darker, choose positive values to make the image brighter and negative values to make the image darker". I went +5 just to see how fast of a shutter speed I could get away with in low light.
mark, if you were +5 then you would have been getting a slower shutter speed to allow more light and this would be probably a totally white image. even if you are in low light, the camera's meter knows that so it will give you a proper exposure of the scene at 0EV. you would go + or - only according to what color your subject is in reference to the bg. i'm going to stop here and let al pick up before i confuse you and me.
Hum..being in 'shutter' priority and it looks to be really, really lowlight I',not real sure what +5 would do with 1/500. The whites don't look bad but there is quite a bit of posturzation(sp) in the BG?? and it is certainly underexposed.
Hi Mark Excellent advice from Harold Solid and to the point.
Will give you a quick primer on exposing but suggest you get Artie's book, easy and excellent.
For the most part the camera meter will do well but you need to help it. Remember the meter is trying to make everything middle gray meaning if you make an image of something very dark it will try to lighten and something very light will try to darken.
Taking this into consideration if your bg is dark you know the meter will try to open (more light) and you will over expose unless you compensate. At first it seems strange but keep in mind what the meter is trying to do.
Compensation wise you are going to be at zero to plus or minus one .... not much more than that. Also you need to check your histogram, all you want is some data on the last box to the right without having any crawl up the right side. In no time you will guessing correctly for most.
When posting do give the compensation and will be easier to evaluate the image !!
Grey Morning Chickadee
