to lighten the humming bird would be to over expose the shot - its +1 ev as it it is.

thanks for commenting.
#725802

and yes I could burn in the bird, I did slightly already. the bird already has close to blown out highlights on the left side. any more and I think it would ruin the shot altogether. the flowers tell the story of why the bird is there to begin with, and cropping them out would leave a bird hanging in nothingness. also under the lighting circumstances, exposing longer would have produced a blurry photo as the hummer is headed toward me, and the DOF is quite narrow.

i'm trying to argue - but that's my thinking on the exposure/composition.

thanks for the feedback. how would you have done the exposure?
#726251

oops #726253

#726621

are you sure your monitor is calibrated?

i know it is a darkish photo - but the bird is in a natural enviroment, and wild animals tend to camoflague themselves well.

i tend to like things on the dark side - I purposely under-expose alot of the time. it's much better than to over-expose.

#726681

Well every monitor is different and from the 2 people I have asked they said they thought it was a little dark too.

Hmm.. thats true

Why do you under-expose shots? #726735

i'll ask if your eye is drawn to the bird.

i under expose - so to speak - because it's possible to bring detail back from an under exposed shot - but not possible to when an area is over exposed.

so when you know you have control of the end result - better to err on the side of hope than that of undoubted loss.

#726775

I think mine also got pretty dark.. I wish I could help more... I just dont know that much #727398

it's a bit more diffcult to get a spot on exposure with a moving subject in an uncontrolled enviroment.

under exposing according to the meter reading is one thing. under exposing the subject is another. as I mentioned earlier - my shot is actually over exposed according to the meter. in order to expose the flowers properly, I had to compromise. I knew the BG, and the bird were far darker than the flowers - so I pushed the exposure up one stop - enough to get the bird exposed well ( I think ), and yet not blow out the flowers - which if I had - would have ruined the shot altogether.

on yours I am assuming you underexposed based on the meter reading ( which was a good choice ). with an evaluative meter reading - the camera is turning your black BG to a mid tone grey ( internally ) - averaging the entire frames light - blowing out the highlights on part of the bug. underexposing will compensate for that averaging, and give you a black BG - I might have stopped the exposure down another 2/3 stops/. then burned the bug in until I was satisfied, and hopefully saved the details on its abdomen.

again I appreciate the feed back greatly, and if nothing else hope I am helping a bit with you learning about exposure ;}

it appears you may know more about it already, than you think you do...

also - i'm by no means saying I am perfect - just explaining why I do things the way I do - be them right or wrong ;}

happy sunday

#727631

i dont know what type of metering system your camera has - but am assuming it's evaulative - meaning it averages all the light that is coming in. this means that if your subject matter is overly dark, or light - the camera is going to average that as a mid tone - say a midtone grey - like an overcast sky. so you have to take that into consideration when using the meter reading. a predominately white image will need to be over exposed to get the white 'white'. a predominately dark shot will need to be underexposed to make the black 'black' - everything else in the shot should fall under close to correct exposure if this is done properly.

with your bug shot - you did well by under exposing according to the meter - yet ( and I dont know if it was done after the fact or in camera ) the highlights on both the leaf, and the bug are blown out - meaning you could still have gone farther under what the meter was telling you.

if your camera offers a spot meter setting - then it isn't averaging the whole seen - but only like 9% of the area around your focus point. this is a beter system - but mostly unavailable on anything but high end cameras.

another way to trick the camera is to set a custom white balance setting - i'll sometimes take a shot of a white board - and over expose it 2 stops. then I use this image as the basis for a custom white balance - forcing the camera to use what I tell it to as an average tone... forcing whiter whites - or blacker blacks ( although mainly used for the whites )- once you do this a number of times it kind of becomes 2nd nature, and you can tell by a specific scene how to trick the camera into seeing what you see - or want it to see.

if you are interested - do some searches on photo sites for 'high key' and you'll see some interesting ways over exposure is used to produce nice results. the effect can be acheived by either methond mentionbed above.

the tried and tested way to get proper exposure at the cost of time, and memory card space is to bracket the shots - taking three of everything at exposure intervals. I tend to avoid this if I can - though in the past is the way I learned how the camera sees light.

let me know if you have other questions - I am no pro - but have been around cameras for quite awhile now - and shoot almost exclusively in manaul mode / manual focus - I don't tend to trust the cameras 'eye' much at all - and prefer to learn to teach it what I see.

#727749

you have some nice photos - it seems you would have a knowledge of exposure, and metering...?

you using all automatic settings?

just wondering. #728301

If your talking to me (lol) I don't use automatic. I used to have it set one way and always kept it like that but, in the last month I started messing around with exposures. Metering? I have no idea.. I dont know what that is. lol #728587