Correct exposures.....??

When ever i take a photo where there is a dark areas interspersed with bright areas, i find that the bright areas get blown out.
How do i get the bright areas correctly exposed as well as the dark areas?

A problem inherent with film or digital....

Try shooting in RAW, use your Histogram - whenever your histogram is bunched on the extreme left or right, data is being lost (critically over or underexposed) Try keeping your exposures to the right of the histogram, without 'hitting the wall' This will enable you t get some exposure of the shadows without blowing the highlights.

Another method is two shoot bracketed exposures and blend using a PS layer mask or using Split ND filters.

Personally I do all three and still sometimes fail!
Good Luck
--



http://www.flickr.com/photos/56011988@N00/

Can you post an example (with exif info) as well as briefly describe how you go about shooting (e.g., what mode you use, and what exposure method you have set)?

For the moment, if you shoot a photo with a number of dark areas to it, the camera will want to pull them up to grey unless you tell it to underexpose, and some bright parts can get blown out.

Shooting RAW can provide you with a bit more range.

If you're using partial metering, that's a very quick way to have parts of your photo over- or underexposed if you're not aware of what you're doing.

Etc.

Anyway, an example and more info woud help. There's not a single answer. It's "it depends."

The picture is of a bird on a tree. Foilage is interspersed with bright light from sun. The areas where there is bright light are all over exposed while the other areas have come okay.......

Cant seem to post the pic.... But the EXIF info is as follows

Shutter: 1/80 sec
Av: F 8.0
Evaluative Metering
Exp Compensation: 0
ISO: 100

Lens - 70 - 300 sigma
White balance: auto

AJ_G said:

Shutter: 1/80 sec
Av: F 8.0
Evaluative Metering
Exp Compensation: 0
ISO: 100

Click to expand...

It'd reeeeally help if you can upload the pic to a place like imageshack.us then post it (just copy and paste the link they'll give you). The exif does only so much without the photo.

Also, still not clear if you're in full auto or P or Av or what, but....

You can drop your exposure compensation, as was already mentioned. You say here it's at 0. I'd start with -2/3 and monitor your histogram to see what's going on. (Also, anytime you're in a scene with a lot of dark, you're probably going to need to underexpose relative to what the light meter says. In bright scenes (like a bright sandy beach), you'll need to tell it to overexpose relative to what it thinks. There's also generally "exposing to the right," i.e., maintaining detail by maximizing exposure without blowing things out, but that's another thread.)

Consider getting off of evaluative metering to one of the other modes -- the camera tries to be "intelligent" and second guesses you in evaluative with you having no idea what it thinks is the subject to expose for. In tough lighting especially, you can't predict what it's going to try and do and why, since it supposedly tries to figure out if you have a backlit subject and whatnot. The other modes function predictably and systematically.

I'd normally use center-weighted average, but in tough lighting situations, partial can be needed. In partial, you just have to be careful what you tell the camera to expose for, and you're often doing exposure and focus as two separate steps. In center-weighted average, you can usually get away with exposing via where you focus most of the time.

Hard to say more without seeing an actual photo.

You can have two problems.

First is an incorrect exposure. Wrong metering can cause overexposure, and thus blown highlights. Negative EC will help here. Using more than 1 AF point can help by better averaging the scene. One can also choose to use partial metering on the highlights. You can also set the exposure by looking at the histogram, making sure that you don't overflow on the right side.

Many possibilities... but it's basicly the same thing... make sure that you correctly, over even underexpose a bit.

The other reason for blown highlights can be the dynamic range of the scene. Sunny days can have an enormous dynamic range, meaning that the shadows are very dark, while the highlights are very bright. Even correctly exposed shots can have blown highlights that way. The solution for this problem, is to make sure that the camera captures the maximum dynamic range. You do that by setting contrast to the absolutely minimum (-2) for JPG. You can go even further by shooting RAW.

Thank you so much for the quick and detailed response. I shoot in the Av mode. And here is the image attached.

http://img113.imageshack.us/my.php?image=img0485cr2xk6.jpg

I think i the picutre did not attached correctly. Here is the link of the image.

http://img113.imageshack.us/my.php?image=img0485cr2xk6.jpg

The easiest way to improve a shot like this would be to shoot Av mode and some fill flash.

How can using more than 1 AF point help the exposure?
--
Dave

AV mode, -1 EC, and fill flash. And, hope the flash doesn't scare the birds!
--
Dave

DaveAll said:

How can using more than 1 AF point help the exposure?

Click to expand...

The exposure is biased towards the AF point. Normally, that's good. But when the area on which you focus is much brighter or darker than the rest of the scene, then you might introduce unwated over or under exposure.

When the subject is large enough to be covered by multiple AF points, then the exposure will be biased towards all those AF points. Therefore, the exposure measured from these AF points get averaged out. With a bit of luck, you'll have both a shadow and a highlight in the AF points, and then the camera can get a perfect exposure measurement.

Though already mentioned, check the parameters you have set on the camera.

One of the best things I ever did was get off the parameter presets and do my own "set," putting contrast all the way down in particular. (I do sharpen at 0 and saturation +1 in combination.) Photos aren't as dramatic straight out of the camera, but photos are better "preserved" and it's not hard to increase contrast in post-processing. Putting contrast all the way down in the camera is a quick and easy way to protect against things like in that photo if you can tolerate adjusting it after the fact when desired.

I'd indeed look into getting off of evaluative metering too, and work with the other modes.

For a photo that looks to have been taken generally in the shade like that, I'd often just automatically be setting my exposure compensation to -1/3 or -2/3 so that the camera doesn't try to bring the photo up to a "normal" exposure when it's actually a slightly dark setting. Though you want to be mindful of "exposing to the right" (see following link), getting familiar with how and when to use exposure compensation is a good thing, and you should be tweaking it fairly regularly.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/expose-right.shtml