Exposure - what has gone wrong here?

[TonyRPH]

I took a couple of pics in our garden this morning, but they seem to be washed out / over exposed.

Camera is an Olympus E500 and these were taken with an Olympus 17.5 - 45mm F1:3.5 - 5.6 lens.

Why I am losing so much detail? Is it just the camera not being good enough, or are there some steps I can take to improve this?

ISO:100 / F4.5 / 1/400s - there just seems to be a general loss of detail here.




ISO:100 / F5.6 / 1/400s - the bee is fairly clear, however the centre of the flower is lost in the colour (if that makes sense)

[TonyRPH]

Avantime said:

Are these photos taken in auto mode? Also are you using Photoshop (or similar), or are these straight off the camera?

They are in auto mode, but with aperture priority so I could set depth of field.

The images are straight off the camera.

@Big_Dog - I had wondered about white balance, however under less bright / harsh conditions, the images are ok.

[TonyRPH]

singlecoil said:

Avantime said:

...Obviously there's not much detail as the image is only 750 pixels wide or so.

Good point. OP should post a decent sized version on Flickr so that we can better see the problem.

Your command is my wish.

Full sized images below, with a 3rd that I'm slightly happier with for comparison.

P.S. Thanks for the advice so far.

Image1

Image2

Image3

Edited by TonyRPH on Tuesday 7th August 17:58

[TonyRPH]

I have no idea why my images won't display despite using "[pic]" links, so I've created direct links to them as well, so they can be downloaded / viewed directly.

Yes another quirk of this forum I guess...

[TonyRPH]

@kestral Thanks, will experiment with aperture / shutter speeds.

@covboy, to be honest, I'd probably not understand what the histogram is telling me