Obs Exposure Settings
Janne Evers
Most camera's light meters would read the dark areas in the background and overexpose these dogwood blossoms. To correct for this, you need to either override the meter with exposure compensation, or adjust the exposure manually.
There's a large gap in this histogram between the brightest pixels and the right edge, indicating underexposure. "Plus" exposure compensation will correct this; try +1.0, then add more if this isn't enough.
Set your camera to manual mode and use either center-weighted, Matrix, or Evaluative metering. As with aperture-priority automatic, you should usually set the f-stop first to control depth of field. Once again, use a small aperture like f/16 to get everything in focus, a large aperture (f/2.8 or f/4) to isolate your subject and throw the background out of focus.
Next set the shutter speed. Most cameras have a scale indicating over- or underexposure in manual mode. Just rotate the shutter speed dial until the scale shows zero. If the shutter speed ends up being slow, use a tripod.
I made these two photographs a few minutes apart. The mist and sun were changing rapidly, but I knew my manual settings (1/20th sec. at f/22, ISO 100) would work for both images, since the light was basically the same. Manual exposure allowed me to work rapidly without constantly adjusting the exposure-compensation dial.
Help! I've been trying to do long exposure to get the bluring effect on running water. No matter what settings I enter into the manual mode all I get is pretty much a white image for anything longer than 0.5 seconds. I set the:
ISO to 100
Aperature to F32
Picture style: Standard
Ambience Priority: Auto
Auto Lighting: Standard
With an f/32 aperture, your images should not be washed out with an ND 8 filter and a 0.5 shutter speed. You really should not need such an extreme aperture setting. A setting of f/8 to f/11 should be sufficient for most landscape shots. Your shutter speed is fine, and ISO 100 is ideal for shooting landscapes from a tripod.
Your best is actually pretty good. Most photos have one challenge. This shot has two challenges: capturing the water and capturing the dynamic range. The fountain seems to be almost exactly what you wanted.
A regular HDR sequence would take 3 exposures: -1 Ev, 0 Ev, and +1 Ev. The under exposure, -1 Ev, would capture the bright areas of a scene. The over exposure, +1 Ev, would capture the dark ares of the scene. The normal exposure, 0 Ev, would be used by the software as a baseline for combining elements of the other shots.
In most HDR scenarios, the camera cannot capture the scene because it is not able to fully meter the scene properly. I believe I used -2, -1, 0 for this shot. I got an exposure lock on the ground in front of me, and used that as the baseline for the compensated shot sequence.
Thank you everyone for your suggestions. You gave me more tools to work with. I was working with the premise that I could do it alone with just camera settings on a single shot. I guess multiple shots with photoshopping is the way to go. I was going crazy with isolating different camera settings and not getting the results I was hoping for.
A more than working knowledge of Photoshop can overcome and create many different results. Great shots come from post editing more so than just from the camera. Having three or more exposure settings make a fine start to edit in PS. The flowing water can be done without any special filters or multi-exposures with PS.
If your scene was more evenly lit, without the large brightly lit sky in the background and the darker walkway and fountain in the shadows in the foreground, you could likely get an acceptable shot from a single exposure.
If you can, shoot the same fountain again but move in closer, maybe angle the camera down some and keep the bright background out of the frame. If the lighting is fairly even across the remaining scene you should get something much closer to the desired results.
When it comes to Eye Adaptation you have to keep in mind that the settings you use are only the second (minor) part of the equation. The first and primary part of the equation is the light intensity that is coming into the post-process stack. Nobody tells you this, which is why noone can ever get it to work properly.
Only after doing the above are you able to get the auto exposure working properly. It needs a large light intensity range in order to understand the difference between dark and lit areas in your scene, and your Unity project needs to be setup to display this wide color and value range properly as well (as per the instructions above).
The metering is fine as long as you follow my advice above, namely that the light range needs to be very large for the metering to understand the difference in value. Directional light and sky exposure should be cranked up to 2.0 minimum, in my above project I used 2.25, in my current project I use 3.0. Below are my settings for AutoExposure in PPSv2.
A photograph's exposure determines how light or dark an image will appear when it's been captured by your camera. Believe it or not, this is determined by just three camera settings: aperture, ISO and shutter speed (the "exposure triangle"). Mastering their use is an essential part of developing an intuition for photography.
Achieving the correct exposure is a lot like collecting rain in a bucket. While the rate of rainfall is uncontrollable, three factors remain under your control: the bucket's width, the duration you leave it in the rain, and the quantity of rain you want to collect. You just need to ensure you don't collect too little ("underexposed"), but that you also don't collect too much ("overexposed"). The key is that there are many different combinations of width, time and quantity that will achieve this. For example, for the same quantity of water, you can get away with less time in the rain if you pick a bucket that's really wide. Alternatively, for the same duration left in the rain, a really narrow bucket can be used as long as you plan on getting by with less water.
In photography, the exposure settings of aperture, shutter speed and ISO speed are analogous to the width, time and quantity discussed above. Furthermore, just as the rate of rainfall was beyond your control above, so too is natural light for a photographer.
One can therefore use many combinations of the above three settings to achieve the same exposure. The key, however, is knowing which trade-offs to make, since each setting also influences other image properties. For example, aperture affects depth of field, shutter speed affects motion blur and ISO speed affects image noise.
A camera's shutter determines when the camera sensor will be open or closed to incoming light from the camera lens. The shutter speed specifically refers to how long this light is permitted to enter the camera. "Shutter speed" and "exposure time" refer to the same concept, where a faster shutter speed means a shorter exposure time.
By the Numbers. Shutter speed's influence on exposure is perhaps the simplest of the three camera settings: it correlates exactly 1:1 with the amount of light entering the camera. For example, when the exposure time doubles the amount of light entering the camera doubles. It's also the setting that has the widest range of possibilities:
How do you know which shutter speed will provide a sharp hand-held shot? With digital cameras, the best way to find out is to just experiment and look at the results on your camera's rear LCD screen (at full zoom). If a properly focused photo comes out blurred, then you'll usually need to either increase the shutter speed, keep your hands steadier or use a camera tripod.
A camera's aperture setting controls the area over which light can pass through your camera lens. It is specified in terms of an f-stop value, which can at times be counterintuitive, because the area of the opening increases as the f-stop decreases. In photographer slang, when someone says they are "stopping down" or "opening up" their lens, they are referring to increasing and decreasing the f-stop value, respectively.
By the Numbers. Every time the f-stop value halves, the light-collecting area quadruples. There's a formula for this, but most photographers just memorize the f-stop numbers that correspond to each doubling/halving of light:
The above f-stop numbers are all standard options in any camera, although most also allow finer adjustments of 1/2 or 1/3 stops, such as f/3.2 and f/6.3. The range of values may also vary from camera to camera (or lens to lens). For example, a compact camera might have an available range of f/2.8 to f/8.0, whereas a digital SLR camera might have a range of f/1.4 to f/32 with a portrait lens. A narrow aperture range usually isn't a big problem, but a greater range does provide for more creative flexibility.
How it Appears. A camera's aperture setting is what determines a photo's depth of field (the range of distance over which objects appear in sharp focus). Lower f-stop values correlate with a shallower depth of field:
The ISO speed determines how sensitive the camera is to incoming light. Similar to shutter speed, it also correlates 1:1 with how much the exposure increases or decreases. However, unlike aperture and shutter speed, a lower ISO speed is almost always desirable, since higher ISO speeds dramatically increase image noise. As a result, ISO speed is usually only increased from its minimum value if the desired aperture and shutter speed aren't otherwise obtainable.
Common ISO speeds include 100, 200, 400 and 800, although many cameras also permit lower or higher values. With compact cameras, an ISO speed in the range of 50-200 generally produces acceptably low image noise, whereas with digital SLR cameras, a range of 50-800 (or higher) is often acceptable.
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