Originally posted by zoomzoomfan I know the basic concepts:
1. Aperture
2. Shutter speed
3. ISO
I know that the three are closely inter-related. Adjust one, and the other two also change.
These are SOME of the basic concepts. ;-)
Quote: Here's my dilemma: Exposure. My shots are always either under exposed or over. More under than over.
In "standard" light... by which I mean, outdoors photography on a bright day... sun behind me... or on a day that's overcast, my pics turn out more-or-less spot on.
Good, that's an important start.
Quote: In low light, i.e. indoors, then I really have to push the envelope on my knowledge to get pics that turn out the way I want them to... lots of garbage shots... keep adjusting F-stop, shutter-speed, ISO, Ev value until the shot is correctly exposed.
In sunshine, with the sun facing me... gosh, I haven't been able yet to get a decent shot. Underexposed almost all of the time.
I'm using the histogram to judge exposure.
Now, for the low-light indoors situation, I'm pretty sure that I can fix things by getting a faster lens. Got my eye on a A-series 28mm F2.8.
Spending money on equipment isn't the solution. It may help, but it will help you more AFTER you understand the problem well. Not discouraging you from spending your money as you wish to spend it. Just letting you know that you could spend thousands of dollars and still have the same problems.
There are many different types of exposure problems. You describe a couple different ones.
Sometimes, there's just not enough light for your camera. You can't shoot in total darkness, of course, but we seldom encounter total darkness. Shooting in darkness that is less than total can be very challenging, but it is possible. You need to slow down the shutter, and/or open up the aperture, and/or increase the ISO. Keep in mind that shutter speed is the factor over which you have the greatest control. Try an experiment. Late at night, turn off nearly all the lights in your living room, leaving just one lamp on. Put the camera into Manual mode, open up the aperture all the way (f/3.5 or f/2.8 or whatever) and put the ISO up to, say, 800. Set the shutter speed to 1 full second and take a photo. If it's still dark, slow the shutter down further to 2 seconds. Doesn't matter if the photo is blurry (in other words, don't worry about putting the camera on a tripod -- just try to hold it as still as you can). Somewhere in there you should be able to get a photo that's remarkably well lit, a photo in which you can see items in your room that you couldn't see with your naked eye. Now you know that you CAN photograph with your camera even in very low light. And you know also that the most flexible control you have is shutter speed.
Now, if you're trying to take photos indoors, say, of parties, or your children playing, if the subjects are moving, then very slow shutter speeds and tripods are impractical. Does that mean that you can't photograph these things? Well, it certainly may mean that you can't take photos with ambient light. But that's one of the things that flash is for. If it's dark enough, you may just need normal flash -- in other words, let flash provide pretty much all the light. If you have a good bit of ambient light, just not enough for a well-exposed photo, then you may be able to drag the shutter (use flash with a very slow shutter) to let the ambient light complement the flash.
Here is a link to a series of photos I put up recently showing how this works.
Now, what if you're outdoors, in the daytime, with the sun shining brightly BEHIND your subjects? This is a difficult lighting scenario even for pros -- and it's quite a different kind of problem from the one discussed in the previous paragraph. There are a couple possible ways to deal with the challenge of shooting towards the sun. Perhaps the best way to deal with it is to avoid it. Move your subjects into the shade or at least move them so the line between you and them is perpendicular to the sun's direction. But if you can't do that, then you have only three options. First, you can expose for the subjects' faces and blow out the background. Second, you can expose for the brightly-lit background and end up with silhouettes of your subjects (which can be a nice effect!). Or third, you can equalize the lighting in the scene. You can sometimes equalize and control the lighting using reflectors, but the obvious and easy way to do it is using flash. Flash with high-speed sync lets you throw light forward at your subjects' faces, while using a shutter faster than the x-sync speed of the camera/flash (for your K100D, I think that x-sync is 1/180th sec) so you let less of the sunlight reach the sensor. But you can use fill flash with normal leading-curtain sync and I generally do. Exactly what you do varies from shot to shot, but you might want to point your flash right at the subjects and increase the flash exposure compensation (NOT the exposure compensation in the body of the camera!) by +1, in other words, make the flash brighter. Or not. I find this hard and usually have to take one or two shots, look at the LCD, and adjust.
Here's the problem in a nutshell. Nearly every scene that you photograph will have areas that are darker and lighter. (There's more to it than dark and light, but let's leave it at that right now.) Sometimes, the dynamic range between the darkest shadows and the brightest highlights is not too great and the camera can capture that entire range satisfactorily. But our eyes are sensitive to a greater dynamic range than the camera's sensor is. When we try to photograph a scene whose dynamic range exceeds the range of the camera, we're faced with a difficult exposure problem.
Happens quite a lot. I'm sitting here looking at my living room right now. It's late afternoon and I have no lamps on. The room feels fairly dark. But there's plenty of sunlight outside and some of it is coming through the windows. I can see detail in the shadows throughout the room -- and I can also see the detail in the curtains on the windows and the light doesn't seem excessively bright to me. But my camera can't see all that. If I shoot at 1/1000th sec, the windows look fabulous but the sofa becomes a lump of blackness; if I shoot at 1/15th sec (six stops slower), the sofa is pretty well exposed, so I can see the texture in the cushions, but the windows are completely blown out.
So I have to make a choice. Using the natural/ambient light, my choices are: expose for the windows (and lose the detail in the shadows) OR expose for the dark sofa (and blow out the highlights in the window) or split the difference (and lose some of both the highlights AND the shadows). But there's another possibility. Don't accept the light as it is. Instead, take steps to reduce the dynamic range -- to equalize the lighting in the scene. And that means manipulating the light. I could lighten the shadows with flash or by turning on lights inside the room. Or I could reduce the sunlight by, perhaps, putting up a screen of some sort on my porch to lessen the amount of sunlight that reaches the windows.
Anyway, the basic problem is not that I don't have a slow enough lens. A faster lens might give me a few more options to try before I despair. But the basic problem lies with the sensor in my camera. Same for you.
Film photography has a similar set of limitations, by the way. Dealing with these limitations effectively is a very great part of the craft of photography, and it's something that takes a long time to get good at, and I don't think it ever gets truly easy for anybody. (I at least am a long way from being able to do well consistently without thinking.)
So don't beat yourself up! If you can take spot-on exposures in good light, and 20% of all your shots are coming out satisfactorily, I'd say you're doing pretty well.
Want more info? There are a zillion places to go. Bryan Peterson's book Exposure is frequently recommended as a good place to start.
Will