Originally posted by Student But the room was so bright I could have worn sunglasses, yet the picture was dark like a cave, you couldn't distinguish anything!
You have learned a very valuable lesson that all of us learn at some point along the way.....our eyes are lousy judges of how much light there is, especially indoors.
Be glad you learned it just farting around in your living room. Most of the people we encounter learn it after coming away from an important event with useless photos.
Also.....you still haven't mentioned what the aperture and shutter speed were. It is entirely possible that you could have taken a photo at ISO100 in that room
but it all depends on what the other two exposure factors were.
I'm not saying that this bit applies specifically to you, but too often people seem to think that putting the camera in Manual mode will result in better pictures and are shocked when they get something totally white or totally black. "Manual"
means "Manual"....."done by hand".....
your hand. You have to set the aperture yourself. You have to set the shutter speed yourself. And in Manual mode a bad exposure is
never the camera's fault.
Don't blame this on digital. If you had been using a film camera with 100 speed film and used the same shutter speed and aperture you would have gotten the same black photo. Saying you need to get used to digital makes it sound like you have experience shooting Manual on film cameras and never had this problem....which would mean that you know about metering and setting the aperture/shutter yourself....which is manifestly
not the case here. If you knew enough on manual film cameras to be able to pull off what you were trying to do, then you knew enough to do it on digital. There's no shame in not knowing something and asking about it; that's what we're here for. But it sort of insults our intelligence a little bit when you try to play it off like that.