D40x settings for bright enviroments...

[Fidgits]

I've been playing around with landscapes today - and need your help.

this was the standard picture... okay, not great, but okay.



however, when taking 'towards' (not into, but in the direction of the light) I got the following:



now i had the camera on the landscape setting - and figure i need to either increase the ISO or shutter time, or both, but not sure what setting to use to do that with, and what to change them to?

any help greatly recieved..

[JimNotJon]

Larger Aperture (smalled Fstop) should do the trick.

[Fidgits]

and how would i achieve that on the D40x?

(sorry, new to all this)

[beano500]

Fidgits said:

... figure i need to either increase the ISO or shutter time, or both, but not sure what setting to use to do that with, and what to change them to?

What are you hoping to achieve?

Your sky has a little detail, that could be brought out, the colour is a bit flat and you could dial in some more saturation and it's generally soft-ish which a bit of sharpening might change.

The following is only a very crude attempt(and oversharpened for exaggeration), but you can see what's potentially there:


More sky detail would need a little less exposure (i.e. make it darker) but of course that darkens shadow as well, so don't go to far unless you're doing something really advanced!

Edited by beano500 on Saturday 26th January 18:05

[VxDuncan]

Basically you've confused the camera's metering. Years ago cameras would assume the average brightness in a scene was mid grey (similar darkness to tanned skin, or grass, sand etc). Therefore, brightly lit scenes like snow or shooting into the sun will be made to be grey, ie underexposed. Likewise, a dark scene like say a shot of a gorilla, will be overexposed, as the camera tries to make the fur grey.

Modern cameras are a lot more complex, but the same basic idea applies, although in your case it was at least expecting the top half of the image to be bright than the bottom (expecting sky in a landscape).

SO what to do? ALways bare in mind you camera wants to make everything grey and compensate. In this case, you could have turned round and metered off the grass, locked the exposure and used that ( Or noted the setting (ie 1/250 @ F8) and used the manual setting to control the camera). ALternatively using the exposure compensation control (the +/- button) and dial in a couple of stops to allow for the sun in the scene. Be careful pointing the camera at the sun obviously...

An ND grad would be good in this case also (maybe with a warmup)

Alternatively you could shoot RAW and adjust afterwards...

Edited by VxDuncan on Saturday 26th January 19:21