Action photo is dark

gopher78

Please give suggestions. I take a lot of pictures on a 10D. The pictures turn out slightly dark. I can adjust with software but you can see how dark the snow is. I'm usually taking about 5 rapid shots with a 28-300 lens. Usually these are mid afternoon and by the time it's late afternoon, I'm not getting enough light and the action gets blurred. I just bought a wide angle lense hoping closer shots may let in more light. Any suggestion why the pictures are dark and also what manual settings I can use to help when it's the light is fading?

pathfinder

gopher78 wrote:

Please give suggestions. I take a lot of pictures on a 10D. The pictures turn out slightly dark. I can adjust with software but you can see how dark the snow is. I'm usually taking about 5 rapid shots with a 28-300 lens. Usually these are mid afternoon and by the time it's late afternoon, I'm not getting enough light and the action gets blurred. I just bought a wide angle lense hoping closer shots may let in more light. Any suggestion why the pictures are dark and also what manual settings I can use to help when it's the light is fading?

You may have accidentally switched he color balance to tungsten light rather than daylight or automatic white balance. Your picture is way too blue - check your manual for instructions in setting the white balance.

pathfinder

pathfinder wrote:

You may have accidentally switched he color balance to tungsten light rather than daylight or automatic white balance. Your picture is way too blue - check your manual for instructions in setting the white balance.

The 10D has two types of settings in the main Mode dial - the Image zone or green settings and the Creative zone or manual settings - On the manual side you can set the white balance anyway you want - sunlight, shadow, cloudy, tungsten, etc - or you may have set the color temperature by rotating the big rear dial when looking at the color temperature setting in the menu mode. Look at page 50 in the manual that came with the 10D.
The 10D is a very sophisticated camera AND computer and it is easy to make a little change and not be aware of it. Because it allows fully automatic shooting it is easy to think that it is not necessary to read the manual, but there is a lot of really good stuff in there.
I suspect some of the complaints about auto-focus difficulties may be due to lack of uderstanding how to choose and use the autofocus points. I know this threw me a loop for a while. It is EASY to accidentally change a setting with the big rear control dial if you are not careful. This is spoken by someone who has been there and done that, so I am not saying this to be critical but to say that I have had similar learning eperiences.
I thought I did not need to read the manual - I don't need no stinking manual - but I found that I had no idea of all the settings that are available and that I needed learn them to really make this camera sing - and it certainly can sing if we do our part correctly.

Pathfinder

fish

Photoshop Elements - auto color correction.

pathfinder

fish wrote:

Photoshop Elements - auto color correction.

The other thing to remember about shooting cameras in a snowy environment is that the all reflective light meters are built on the assumption that the overall area being metered is about 16% neutral grey - and as a result will ry to expose a bright sunlit snow field or a bright white sandy beach as a mid tone not as a highlight which is what it is. When shooting in bright sun on snow you need to open the aperture 1 or 2 stops or use the auto-exposure compensation to allow more light to enter the camera to raise the exposure of the snow from a dull neutral grey to a bright highlight very near the high end of the RGB color space - that is to say when you look at the absolute RGB values in Photoshop or Elements or any other image editor - sunlit snow should be very near 255,255,255. It should not be near a neutral grey tone of 120,120,120.

This again is why you cannot just put a camera on automatic pilot and get perfect exposures every time.

Pathfinder

Shay Stephens

pathfinder wrote:

The other thing to remember about shooting cameras in a snowy environment is that the all reflective light meters are built on the assumption that the overall area being metered is about 16% neutral grey - and as a result will ry to expose a bright sunlit snow field or a bright white sandy beach as a mid tone not as a highlight which is what it is. When shooting in bright sun on snow you need to open the aperture 1 or 2 stops or use the auto-exposure compensation to allow more light to enter the camera to raise the exposure of the snow from a dull neutral grey to a bright highlight very near the high end of the RGB color space - that is to say when you look at the absolute RGB values in Photoshop or Elements or any other image editor - sunlit snow should be very near 255,255,255. It should not be near a neutral grey tone of 120,120,120.

This again is why you cannot just put a camera on automatic pilot and get perfect exposures every time.

Pathfinder

Yes indeed, and if you are using the zone system, you could spot meter off the snow and set the exposure so that the meter reads +2EV to get good results.

You could also set the exposure with the histogram so that the histogram is weighted to the right hand side.

In both cases, you will be forcing the camera to use a longer exposure than the camera thinks is proper, but what does a camera know, it has no idea you are in the snow, it takes a photographer to do that properly. So do the right thing, take control of the camera, and get the results you really want.

fish

So how about using a warming filter in snow? Good idea on a digicam or not?

patch29

fish wrote:

So how about using a warming filter in snow? Good idea on a digicam or not?

I would say that there is not a need. You can dial in your Kelvin temp or do a custom white balance and it will be fairly neutral, add or subtract K if you want to have it warmer or cooler. You can always add warmth in Photoshop or your RAW convertor. Photoshop CS has warming/cooling filters built in to make it easier, you just choose a percentage that you like, not sure about Elements.

I think that is one of the benefits of using a raw program is that you can make color adjustments on your monitor at home and learn what different color balances mean and do. Then when you are in the field shooting you will know what you want to do for an effect.


In the above before version of the photo it looks as thought the color balance was set to daylight (or the auto pick something close) and the shot was taken in indirect light (open shade, cloud, skylight). The color temp of daylight is about 5500K, skylight around 10,000K, shade and cloudy in-between and tungsten is around 3200K just to give you some rough numbers to try when shooting if you want to set it manually. Try to match the K to the light source and the color should be close. In the end Fish if you wanted to warm a photo you shot with your flash you could dial in a temp of 6000-6500-7000k (the higher you go the warmer it will get) and it would be warmer than standard. Go test it out (try it against the camera flash white balance) and let us know what you come up with.