Exposure compensation for water/foliage/light and dark color
Michael
most lighting situations. I'm having trouble with a couple areas. When
I'm shooting animals on the water I don't particularly have time to use
an incident meter, so I'm using auto-exposure. Pictures seem
underexposed I'm sure because the water is so bright. Does anyone have
a starting degree of exposure compensation? 1 stop? Also would it
depend on the weather, cloudy vs. sunny. Second, I generally use an
incident meter to calculate sunny day exposures. When I use spot
metering on trees and such, they tend to over-expose slightly because of
the shadows mixed in with the highlights. What's a good compensation
for foliage? One other area is with color affecting TTL flash
metering. My camera uses center-weighted TTL flash metering. What's a
good flash compensation for people wearing white? Navy blue? My guess
would be since the face is generally about half the picture maybe just
+.5 or -.5 would suffice. Anyone elses experience could give me a good
jump start for experimenting, the only true way to learn. Thanks.
Michael
Peter Mikalajunas
>I'm beginning to shoot slides for the first time. I'm doing well with
>most lighting situations. I'm having trouble with a couple areas. When
>I'm shooting animals on the water I don't particularly have time to use
>an incident meter, so I'm using auto-exposure. Pictures seem
>underexposed I'm sure because the water is so bright. Does anyone have
>a starting degree of exposure compensation? 1 stop? Also would it
Use a polarizing filter to kill the reflections. It will also help to saturate
the colors.
>depend on the weather, cloudy vs. sunny. Second, I generally use an
>incident meter to calculate sunny day exposures. When I use spot
>metering on trees and such, they tend to over-expose slightly because of
>the shadows mixed in with the highlights. What's a good compensation
>for foliage? One other area is with color affecting TTL flash
Slide film has a range limit of about 5 f-stops. What this means is that some
scenes are very difficult to shoot. I am not saying that foliage is. But for
this and your other questions, there are no "magic" exposure settings. What you
see as over-exposed, I may see as right on. It is a matter of translating your
vision onto film.
The best advice I know of is to bracket and then bracket some more. The second
piece of advice is to carry a small notebook. Write down the frame number and
the settings. When the slides are developed, make notes to yourself in the
notebook. It really does help.