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Hi!! First post...

I went to a waterbird hide with my camera club (Berwick Viewfinders) at 5.30pm and set the D80 to Aperture priority and was dissapointed with the results.

Pic is on my flickr site - http://www.flickr.com/photos/kwijibot/3025119905/

Can anyone tell me why it is shooting so damn dark? I had the camera set to auto whitepoint and matrix for the exposure control.

I think i am going to have to push the exposure compensation to +1 next time i take shots at dusk but its so disappointing to not realise from the lcd on the back how dark the shots were.
I guess its all part of the learning curve and i should be able to adjust with photoshop ok.

Comments?

Thanks, Dennis.

Dennis,

Welcome.

Please post your image so that it appears within this thread. Many people - and I'm amongst them - won't go to external sites to view images. It makes it way easier to simply view the image(s) within your post, and then to offer whatever suggestions etc within the thread, and we don't have to switch between this tab and that tab (or this window and that window).

Also, please add a meaningful location to your profile. Please review the message to new members on the portal page for an explanation of what "meaningful" means.

Pssh never mind it didn't link properly.

D.

Hopefully this time.

Hi Dennis, Welcome. Without seeing the original view as you did, this doesn't look too bad. Of course, if the original scene was much brighter, some setting is affecting that. A few thoughts to make it easier for other to analyse your work and help. I am not sure if Flickr strips all the EXIF information, if so it may be worth uploading to a site such as http://www.imageshack.us or similar as this image has no exif information at all for the members here to help you with. When the exif information is in there people can see all the settings used to take the shot and so advise. A common program used by some here to look at exif information is I-exif which is free from http://www.opanda.com

Also, as stated in the pink band across the top of all posting pages, there is an 800 pixel limit on all images posted here to keep downloads reasonable for all. Might be worth posting an image into imageshack or similar, to see if anyone can see any unusual settings. Was the scene appreciably lighter in real life?

Dennis,

As Glen says, this doesn't look too bad to me, but a couple of thoughts that may help.

If the scene (as you recollect it) was brighter, understand that you were (obviously) looking at (and photographing) a large reflective surface. This has the capacity to fool the automatic metering system in your camera. Your meter will see this as being a particularly bright scene, and, absent any further input from you, compensate accordingly.

This is where you need to use that other aspect of your camera's meter - you. You need to learn to read the scene, and to try to understand how your camera might be misreading it, and then apply the required overrides as needed. This, of course, comes with time and experience, but you can cheat. Learn how to read your camera's histogram: what does the histogram for this image look like? By chimping the histogram on-site, you can make the required adjustments in real time, and pull better images from the camera as a result.

Did you shoot raw or as a JPEG? If raw, how did you convert the image to a JPEG? I ask because the image looks suspiciously like a raw image that has been processed by something like Lightroom which doesn't know about the camera settings.

ATJ wrote:Did you shoot raw or as a JPEG? If raw, how did you convert the image to a JPEG? I ask because the image looks suspiciously like a raw image that has been processed by something like Lightroom which doesn't know about the camera settings.

I have used the D80 a fair bit when I was between cameras (I moved from the D40x to the D300 and there was a period where I was lent a D80 by my great friend) and never noticed it had trouble like this. If you get a chance can you bracket shoot something similar (RAW + JPG) then have a look at what you get. I would also check your exposure compensation just in case.

Cheers
Cameron

I shot as jpeg - still haven't tried raw on the D80 as i only got it on the weekend.

Aperture was f 5.7, Exp 1/160, ISO 100, 105mm focal length (18-135mm lens no vr) No flash, sRGB image.

Sorry i normally drop my images to 800 pixels before uploading to flickr but i am at work...
Will do so before linking any more images to the forums.

Thanks, Dennis.

If this was JPEG, it can't be the conversion, so you'll need to look elsewhere.

What settings do you have on the camera for metering? Spot? Centre-weighted? Matrix?

Have you tried shooting something a little less complex? It is possible that the reflectiveness of the water in the above shot fooled the meter resulting in under exposure. Try taking a photograph of some sunlit grass or a wall or something else without a lot of reflections.

I had it set to matrix after reading Ken Rockwell's notes on the D80.

Normal daylight shots look ok to me but all my waterbird shots (100 plus shots) were quite dark even after i changed the ISO to 400 and changed the white point to shade.

I will play with the exposure compensation and do some test shots at the same time today to see what results i get on a normal scene without water.

Dennis.

Dennis The Menace wrote:Normal daylight shots look ok to me but all my waterbird shots (100 plus shots) were quite dark even after i changed the ISO to 400 and changed the white point to shade.

I suspect, then, that you are seeing the metering having issues with the difficult lighting conditions with the water. It looks to be giving a sort of backlighting effect and so you will probably need to experiment with exposure compensation and use the histogram to assess the results.

Dennis The Menace wrote:even after i changed the ISO to 400

That would not have helped matters.

I think that the issue is exactly as per my initial suggestion: that your meter incorrectly compensated for the highly reflective water, and underexposed the images as a consequence of this.

and changed the white point to shade.

White point? That's something that you select in your post processing to alter the way that curves are applied to the image. I suspect that you mean white balance.

I will play with the exposure compensation and do some test shots at the same time today to see what results i get on a normal scene without water.

If you can, I suspect it would be more beneficial to do this on a scene including the large expamses of water: you have already determined that the scenes without the water are fine, and reshooting those will not really be teaching you all that much more.

When you review the images on-site, do not simply just chimp the images: your camera's display is not calibrated, and it is not a reliable source for determining, on its own, whether exposure is correct. Instead, switch to a histogram mode, and look at the distribution of the graph. It should tend towards the middle (ish), and not run off at either the left edge (under exposed) or the right edge (over exposed).

Thanks for the tips - the Histogram on the image i posted is definitely over to the left in photoshop so underexposed.

Dennis.

Thanks to your tips on proper exposure using the histogram i was able to take some shots on the weekend using an old 50mm 1.8 film lens and manual exposure settings.



Cheers, Dennis.

I like the reflections of the sky in the armour, my only suggestion would be to compose in a portrait style and capture all of his shield. The picture does appear to exposed correctly...nice one.

Dennis,

Excellent, although this doesn't address the problems you demonstrated in the image you initially presented, because that had a large reflective area included in that image, but which is absent from this one. That can have a significant effect upon how your camera meter reads a scene, and so I'm not yet satisfied that you have overcome the issue you initially presented in this thread.

That said, I too would look at framing and composition in this image. Gerry has suggested that perhaps it should have been shot in a portrait (vertical) format. I won't disagree with that assessment, but I will suggest that you crop this image in a very different manner:

From the bottom of the image, crop from just above the shield. Remove it completely, and everything that is below the top of it.

From the top of the image, leave a little space above their heads, but not a whole lot. There's no direct point of reference I can give you, but if you cut the space above the heads by about 50%, you'll be on the right track.

Finally, leave a little space to the right of the guy in green, but again, not a lot. I would probably look at somewhere about where the wall of the green and yellow tent meets its roof: remove everything to the right of that point.

And finally, pull back on the sharpening you've applied: I'm seeing some evidence of haloing here, whichs suggest a tad too much sharpening.

that would be the "Benny Hill crop"................

Crop option 1


Crop option 2


Personally i like the colour of the shield in the shot but i should have got the whole thing in...

Thanks, Dennis.

Dennis The Menace wrote:Crop option 2

Not quite what I had in mind, Dennis. Keep everything on the lh side of this image - no cropping of the left. (is that a political statement?)

You want the two subjects looking out, towards our left and they need to have some space in the image to be gazing out over.