K-30 Overblown exposures

Yesterday I spent 6 hours in the mountains.

On reviewing my photographs I realised most of my shots were dreadfully overexposed. I used aperture mode then the 'Landscape' mode to try and solve it to little avail.

I actually got better shots in manual mode and estimating the shutter speed. Although I cannot help but feel the K-30 should do a better job as my 4MP Pentax Optio 450 would have handled these scenes a lot better!

I realise the scenes are difficult with the mountains in shade and the background is a bright overcast sky.

I tried to recover the following shot (DNG file) with Photoshop CS5 but as you can see part of the sky is completely white instead of blue. I think this is what is called clipping when the camera cannot handle the dynamic range? It only occurred to me that this is what the HDR function is for but then you cannot use RAW. The EXIF data reports 0EV Exposure Bias. I had to reduce the exposure by 2 stops in the following shot.

Boy... DSLR photography what a learning curve!



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Simon
Legacy lens lover