help on exposure setting

ky1

hi am new to smugmug could anyone give me some guidance please on what exposure setting i should have used for this shot any help would be greatly appreciated

pathfinder

Welcome KY,


I enlarged your image a bit, the better to see it.

I am not sure why you feel this image was that badly exposed - trying to capture detail in the black locomotive in the shade and still not blow out the sky will be challenging, without resorting to HDR, or multiple exposures at different EVs. Blacks in the shadows are easily 5-6 stops darker than whites in sunlight, and clouds are probably even brighter still. A silicon sensor maxes out around 5 or 6 stops of lattitude.

I think the picture really lacks a good black point to help get the deeper, more saturated blacks that it lacks. If you routinely set your black and white point, my apology. If you do not, you can start here

Once again, welcome to dgrin - to a shooter from across the pond, in the UK.

A bunch of us dgrinners are going to the Isle of Mull in the next few days

jfriend

ky1 wrote:

hi am new to smugmug could anyone give me some guidance please on what exposure setting i should have used for this shot any help would be greatly appreciated

To provide you some advice, we might need to know the answers to a couple questions. What metering mode were you using? Do you understand generally how your metering system works? Do you know what happens if you point a spot meter at brilliant snowing scene? Or point a spot meter at a black cat?

And, what did you want to have happen in the exposure of this shot that you didn't get? This is what is called a back-lit high dynamic range shot with a large range between the brights and the darks. Without doing fancing blending of multiple shots, you will generally have to decide whether you want to favor the foreground or the background so you can optimize for one or the other. In this shot, if you had favored the foreground exposure, it would have made the train detail more visible, but it would have washed out the sky. I would guess you used some sort of matrix (or full scene) metering which tried to preserve detail in the sky, but sacrificed some visible detail in the train.

You can also do some pretty good things with this image in post processing to restore visible shadow detail.

ky1

pathfinder wrote:

Welcome KY,


I enlarged your image a bit, the better to see it.

I am not sure why you feel this image was that badly exposed - trying to capture detail in the black locomotive in the shade and still not blow out the sky will be challenging, without resorting to HDR, or multiple exposures at different EVs. Blacks in the shadows are easily 5-6 stops darker than whites in sunlight, and clouds are probably even brighter still. A silicon sensor maxes out around 5 or 6 stops of lattitude.

I think the picture really lacks a good black point to help get the deeper, more saturated blacks that it lacks. If you routinely set your black and white point, my apology. If you do not, you can start here

Once again, welcome to dgrin - to a shooter from across the pond, in the UK.

A bunch of us dgrinners are going to the Isle of Mull in the next few days

hi pathfinder thankyou for the link i never gave it a thought to set the black/white points will definetely have another go at it i am none to good at the post processing bit have spent the last year getting my head round cs3 enjoy the isle of mull i also live on a very rugged coast line at the opposite end of scotland way down near landsend in cornwall thank you for your advice much appreciated

ky1

jfriend wrote:

To provide you some advice, we might need to know the answers to a couple questions. What metering mode were you using? Do you understand generally how your metering system works? Do you know what happens if you point a spot meter at brilliant snowing scene? Or point a spot meter at a black cat?

And, what did you want to have happen in the exposure of this shot that you didn't get? This is what is called a back-lit high dynamic range shot with a large range between the brights and the darks. Without doing fancing blending of multiple shots, you will generally have to decide whether you want to favor the foreground or the background so you can optimize for one or the other. In this shot, if you had favored the foreground exposure, it would have made the train detail more visible, but it would have washed out the sky. I would guess you used some sort of matrix (or full scene) metering which tried to preserve detail in the sky, but sacrificed some visible detail in the train.

You can also do some pretty good things with this image in post processing to restore visible shadow detail.

hi thankyou for your prompt reply unfortunately i didnt use spot metering i think perhaps i should have i was in aperture priority mode f8 and used full metering locking the metering point from a grey card i had hoped this would give me an overall exposure for the sky and the steam engine i did think the engine would have had more detail in it luckily i didnt use this method for all the shots also they were moving quite fast at the time so didnt have much time to think about it the sun was very hazy and with the combination of the black engines i wasnt sure where to meter from hence the grey card i expected to see something better than a big blob will have another go at processing it

Art Scott

Actually this photo has a lot of definition in the blacks as well as in the sky....I do not think you could have gotten any better exposure with out shooting for an HDR or using a fill flash for the locomotive......metering a grey card with camera or using an incident hand held meter would have been my choice to get exposure...(normally I opt for the handheld meter rather than grey card....only because it is actually smaller)...........I would just try to re-process setting the wht/ blk point and going from there.....also shoot in raw to give yourself more latitude in processing and if still unsure bracket.....

pathfinder

I tried to improve this image by using separate curves for the sky and the train, but did not really make it much better, the smokestack is now too gray. There is some detail in the locomotive, but the engineer is still hidden back in the shadow of the cab.

The image really needed fill flash to help lower the contrast ratio between the locomotive and the bright sunlit clouds in the background.

The histogram is essentially two peaks, one at each end of the histogram scale.