Originally posted by explr1 I've had my K10d for a few months now and am getting tired off it taking under exposed crappy pictures that have become wasted memories. Why can't the K10d meter correctly when Canons and Nikons can? I took over 400 pictures on my trip to Mystic and only had 50 or so keepers. I've come to the conclusion that the K10d sucks!!! I'm sure there will be people that are going to blame the bad pictures on me, but my wifes lowly 3.2 mega pixel Canon PowerShot A75 took better pictures of the same objects and exposed them correctly.
I get the impression that you don't think it's your fault. So you have "come to the conclusion" that the K10D sucks. But I'm afraid that you've come to the ONE conclusion which is clearly wrong. Did you purchase the K10D without being aware that many other photographers using the same tool have taken really great photos, that the camera got terrific reviews, etc.?
The alternatives you should be considering are: (1) you didn't use the camera properly, or (2) your particular camera is defective. It could be (2), but (1) is MUCH more likely.
I looked at the EXIF info for two of the photos (the first and the last) and it looks like you were shooting on Auto mode, and that in the first photo you were shooting with center spot metering, while with the other photo you'd switched to center weighted metering.
Now, notice that in the center of the first photo there's a big white sail. Notice also that it's pretty well exposed - it's the rest of the picture that's got a problem. If I've got these details right, then it looks to me like the camera did its job just fine on that shot.
About the last photo (with the woman stepping off the ship) I'm a little less sure what to say. Looks like center-weighted metering here picked up the bright back lighting above and to the right of the woman and that had an effect. Not sure but that's a possibility.
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Anyway, a couple suggestions.
1. Take the camera off Auto. I suggest you switch to P, learn to use the green button.If you want a point and shoot, borrow your wife's.
2. Configure the camera so that it displays both the histogram and blown highlights in the display screen after you take a shot, and take a quick look at that feedback every time or as often as you can. These can be tremendously helpful. Don't pay so much attention to how the shot LOOKS. The screen is pretty small and it's actually hard to tell. But you can learn a LOT from the histogram and the highlights flasher.
3. These shots were rather challenging exposures: a big dark thing in the foreground, with bright sky in the background. You need to understand that, when the dynamic range of the photo is quite large, as in these photos, you've got a real problem to deal with. If you want to get the most out of your investment, learn a bit about exposure. Bryan Peterson's book Exposure is a great start, I also like Chris Weston's books on the subject.
4. In this case, you have two easy choices. First choice: Set camera to spot or center-weighted metering. Point camera right at an important but dark area of the ship and hit exposure lock button. Recompose the shot quickly and shoot.
You risk blowing some highlights in the sky here, but that may be inevitable. And the ship should be nicely exposed. Second choice: Put camera on matrix metering, take a shot, look at histogram and flashing blown highlights, and adjust the meter as necessary (+/- button) and shoot again. What's the difference between these two? If you meter on the dark areas yourself,
you are making the decision about what's important. If you use matrix metering, you let the camera simply average everything. I don't use matrix metering a lot but when I do use it, I get results that are actually better than I would expect. So I think it's worth a try.
5. There's a third, less easy choice, and it's the one I'd probably use. I'd probably meter on an important dark area of the subject, but then deliberately
adjust the exposure down a little (-1/3EV)
. The goal here is to get the shadowy areas pretty close to properly exposed, but at the same time to avoid blowing the sky. I would then bring up the shadowy areas in post-processing.
6. Finally, consider saving your raw files. They will give you more data to work with in post processing and this can be really important.
Will