Ask-And Ye Shall Receive- Part 1

I recently took a photo that I was very disappointed with. I decided to reach out to some forums online and request feedback. I was extremely nervous! Oh boy! I was stunned with the number of responses. I received such helpful and constructive critical feedback that I have decided to share it over the next four days here in this blog. I have anonymised the contributors and the forums.

My hope is that by sharing it will be of value to lots of other beginner photographers. I have highlighted particularly helpful responses in red.

Here is the original image:

f/13, 1/500,ISO 200, 300mm aperture priority

Here is my original request:

Hello Everyone. I am looking for advice please. I consistently struggle with getting the right exposure. Please see the attached example. I was using the Canon 350 D camera, Canon 75-300 mm lens., f/13, 1/500 sec, ISO 200, 300mm focal length, AV mode. I have looked at countless videos on Exposure Compensation. Should I be doing something differently with exposure modes? Is it simply the distance? It was a bright day, blue sky, quite a bit of sun. Your advice would be appreciated. Thank You

Here are the responses:

Was it hazy when you took the photo or crystal clear to your eyes?

Did you try a photo with the Auto setting on your camera?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Take the photo into an image processing program and adjust the white and black points to taste.

The lightest tone in the posted image is still quite dark.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A few issues working against you...

Your metering is making everything in this dynamically flat scene a drab middle gray when something a bit brighter would probably be preferable - some positive exposure compensation would help greatly here.

A polarizing filter could help with the haze/lack of contrast a bit, but you probably still won’t be getting a great looking result (not all all scenes make great photographs).

Stopping down all the way to f/13 isn’t usually a good idea with an APS-C camera due to diffraction losses. With no depth of field issues to worry about, you would get the sharpest result here using the sharpest possible aperture - probably around f/5.6.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

APS-C lenses are almost always sharpest at around f/5.6 and will suffer significantly softening beyond f/10 or so. As far as exposure compensation goes, you will generally want to record the brightest important highlight detail (probably the brightest clouds in this case) just below clipping (they should be white, not grey). I’m not familiar with your camera, but a histogram or highlight warning blinkies can be very helpful for dialing in the necessary exposure compensation. Mirrorless cameras are great in these situations as you can see a real-time exposure preview before taking the shot. Without some post processing, I don’t really see a great result happening here straight out of the camera in any case.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I suspect that your lens isn’t particularly good at 300mm. Try backing off to 250mm. Also, your camera’s auto-focus system may have had difficulty with that featureless scene.

I’ve never seen any advice about stopping down a camera like yours to f/10 to f/16 to get sharper images. Remember, you are not using a pin-hole camera, and the lens is most likely sharpest around f/5.6 to f/8 when zoomed to 300mm.

Note that some lenses are sharpest at f/2.8, so there’s no general rule about stopping down for sharpness, provided that the depth of field is taken into consideration.

Test for yourself by taking a series of shots with various aperture settings, but use a subject with some fine detail so you can easily detect the optimum aperture.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When you put your camera in Av mode, the camera is going to a shutter speed roughly ,twice what your focal length is. Since you were shooting at 300mm, the camera selected a shutter speed of 1/500th of a second.

1/500 combined with the small aperture of f/13 is not going to let a lot of light in. As others have suggested, try opening up your aperture to f/5.6 or f/6.3. That will let more light in.

Also, do you remember what your White Balance was? Your picture has a lot of blue in it.

If you want to emphasize the blues in your photo, choose the Daylight White Balance instead of the AWB. I know that on my Canon camera, the AWB setting tended to make my pictures look "washed out".

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I don't know how you got the metering so far off, but setting the white point and the black point and sharpening a bit in post can help a lot with this image. And, as has already been said, shoot at f/5.6 to f/8.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The metering did what metering does, it made everything middle grey. The issue here is dynamic range - there isn't any. The long focal length, distant subject, atmospheric haze, diffraction, and possibly focus issues all combined into a perfect storm of a photo that was doomed from the start. The histogram reveals no blacks, no whites, just a lump in the middle.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One of your problems is that it is very likely that every one of those videos was nonsense. Most of them are, with gross mistakes about the very basics of photography. I'm going to suggest that you take a completely different approach, which you'll find much less frustrating.

First, 'exposure' means the amount of light energy (strictly per unit area) that is projected onto the sensor. It does not mean how light or dark the picture looks. That's the first thing that many of those videos will get wrong. I'm going to use the word 'lightness' for how light or dark the picture looks - it's a technical and maybe scary word but is the right one to use. Lightness and exposure are related by ISO. Set a low ISO and it takes a big exposure (lots of light energy) to get a pleasing lightness. Set a high ISO and it only takes a small exposure to get it. That's really all the basics of ISO - I betting that every video you watched told you stuff that was either irrelevant or worse, completely wrong.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So I'm guessing that when you say you can't get the 'right exposure', what you mean is that you don't like the lightness of the images that you produce. As you've discovered, the videos are no help at all. They likely told you that 'exposure' was aperture, shutter speed and ISO (wrong), and what you had to do was 'balance' (hard to balance three things) these to get 'correct' or 'proper' exposure. They didn't tell you what that meant or how to do it. The simple reason for that is that they don't know.

So, what I'm going to recommend is that you stop trying to use exposure to get the lightness that you want. Instead shoot raw and set the lightness using a nice computer screen where you can adjust it as you want and if you get it wrong, you can go back and do it again. It's much, much easier than trying to do this three-way 'balance' towards an unstated goal with no visual feedback about how it will turn out. When you think about it, that's got to be hard. Get yourself a raw developing tool. DPP, which is free with your camera, will do fine and can be downloaded from Canon.

Next, how to set exposure. The key point about exposure is the smaller you set it the greater the visible noise in the photo, so the only rule for setting exposure is to set it as large as you can. There are in general three things that stop you setting an arbitrarily large exposure. One is how big an exposure your camera can accept. When you get down to base ISO, if you give it too much exposure the highlights will clip to pure white and there is nothing that you can do about that, so if the meter says + at base ISO, you're setting too large an exposure.

The second thing that limits exposure is how much DOF you want. Setting deep DOF reduces exposure, so you always want to set the smallest f-number (largest aperture) that you can whilst still getting enough depth of field for the shot you want.

The third thing that limits exposure is avoiding camera shake or subject motion blur. Again you want to set the slowest shutter speed you can, but keep it fast enough to avoid shake. 1/focal length of the lens (x1.6 with your camera) is a good rule but you can go slower if you have steady hands or IS.

So, when you've set the shallowest DOF and the slowest shutter speed that will still get a decent photo, you have the most exposure and thus the lowest noise you will get. Just set the ISO to centre the meter. Many people have problems with that because they are wrongly told by those same videos you've been watching that ISO causes noise. It doesn't, exposure is the real culprit. If you've already maximised exposure then don't worry about ISO - the shot is as good as it's going to be. In fact, you can use auto ISO and save the bother of setting it yourself (but unfortunately not, as I remember, on a 350D - that was my first digital camera).

You can use other exposure modes, but you just have to remember what is the outcome you're looking for, which is the biggest exposure. Since ISO is inversely proportional to the exposure at which the meter centres, biggest exposure is akin to saying lowest ISO. So the advice is really don't use more DOF than you need and don't use a faster shutter speed than you need, but if you've done that and you need a high ISO to centre the meter, don't worry about it. And don't try to use exposure to set lightness - do that on a computer from the raw file.

Looking at your shot, the real problem isn't lightness, it's very low contrast, probably due to heat haze. That's a very long lens and you're photographing through a lot of warm air. It's a bit dark as well, but it's hard to judge how it would come out with the more contrast. You can also set the contrast as you want when you process a raw file. You had the camera in full auto, so it was taking all the exposure decisions. It was a smaller aperture than you needed, (f/13) which will have reduced the sharpness on the photo, and made you get a smaller exposure. Than you might have had. The problem with this is that the camera is making all the decisions, it's very hard to know what it's going to do. Had you known in advance it was going to get it a bit dark, you could have put in some EC, but you didn't. That's why I advise taking control yourself with a computer and the raw file.