Weird question regarding camera getting it very wrong

Hi all,

Canon 6D, Canon 24-105mm F4

I have a bit of a weird question. On the weekend my fiance and I went to some old settler's village here in Sydney, Australia to shoot some photos. I usually use my camera on auto ISO when using TV or AV mode. I was shooting an old abandoned house with a stormy sky behind it. It wasn't dark that day, just overcast a bit. The weird thing is when I went to focus on the house I was on F4.0 as I was using my 24-105mm. When I focused on the house it went to 100 ISO and 1/4000 shutter speed. Needless to say the photos looked very, very dark. I tried a few shots and the same thing happened. I went changed the ISO to 800 and the shutter speed still went to 1/4000. I turned around to take a photo of the orchards under the same sky and the camera functioned perfectly on auto ISO, but back again towards the house and it went out of whack again.

I was able to get some good shots when I switched to manual and made all the settings myself (4.0, 125ms, ISO 800) but in auto ISO and even with the camera on 800 ISO it still went to some incredibly fast shutter speed and made the whole photo look pitch black.

I also turned off auto lighting optimiser but still no luck.

Any ideas what could cause this? I'm happy to shoot in manual for this kind of thing if I can but I was hoping to be able to use AV mode especially if I'm in a hurry (ie with a fiance getting bored pretty quickly.

My first guess is metering and how you set it up.
Most likely the camera was metering off of the background sky not the building.
If that is the case though once you shot the building correctly your background sky or some part of the picture should be completely blown out.

Edit: My guess is you are using Evaluative or Center Weighted.

I personally like center weighted, but it's necessary to watch the histogram like you did.

Can you post the image?

Dave

I'll load it up into Lightroom at work and upload it.

What kind of metering should I use in these instances? I think it was evaluative

Oh, and I wasn't watching the histogram, I still don't know how to read it properly

Spot maybe in that one instance. But there is no right answer, only that you know what the camera is doing and pick the one that works for you.
I keep mine on spot metering because it suits me. But that might give me the opposite problem in that if I do not pay attention it blows out the background.
I know this so if I am shooting landscape I stick with manual mode, meter the background with spot and meter the subject then decide what exposure I want.
Evaluative is supposed to sort that out for you.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Squidy

Oh, and I wasn't watching the histogram, I still don't know how to read it properly

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re: histogram

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/...eras-histogram

I prefer center weighted because it is predictable. Evaluate uses an algorithm to try and predict what the proper exposure is. If what I'm getting doesn't match my expectations I dial in EV compensation or put in manual mode.

Dave

http://i.imgur.com/o44n28u.jpg

This is the image, it's F4.0, ISO 100 (selected by auto iso) and 1/4000

And apologies about the watermark, I forgot to turn that feature off

Sky is exposed properly and is the majority of the frame. My guess is evaluative and it grabbed the sky.

https://photographersconnection.com/...etering-modes/

Btw, one of the features I am hoping flows down from the 1d series to the 5D IV is exposure tracking to the AF point.

That's a really tough scene. This one might beg for HDR - the shot you have here exposed for the sky and another with the house/ground exposed properly.

As is, for this image to work out it would appear to require a significant brightening of the house/ground.

Dave

I agree with Kayaker, the sky was the majority of the picture. It appears the sun was behind the clouds.

If you use LR you could raise the shadows a bit and see how it looks.

I've raised the exposure on LR and then used a grad ND on the sky and it looks good, but I guess i'm just wanting to learn what I've done wrong so I can get it right in camera first :)

Grand ND on camera for the example photo?

I think you have the right answer to get it right at the camera.

Whoops, sorry, the grad ND I used to get a better shot was the grad in LR. I've bought a set of Cokin grads but to be honest not really fond of the quality. But, at 1/5th the price of the Lees I can't complain (too loudly)

So now begins the lessons in ETTR. Exposure to the right - in a set shot like this - take a moment, once you are practiced that moment will be about .5 seconds. :).

Pick AV/TV and an ISO - you will be adjusting one against the other two.

The sky is what overwhelmed the AE. For landscapes, I am a fan of spot metering and spot metering only. I meter the most crucial element of the pic, double check the highlights ( brightest sky in this case). Set the exposure for just barely below the clipping point (this you have to double check your gear on). With the over exposure blinkies on, take a pick, there should be the very smallest portion dot of a blinky -- come down 1/3rd a stop from this. There are couple of ways to do this. Some version of manual - or some version of exposure compensation - with practice you will be able to see the difference between what you are metering and the clipping points in the scene. You can use ISO as your variable or I typically use shutter speed. I set a low ISO and then the aperture I want for the effect and fiddle w/ shutter speed 1st and then ISO second in the games of compromises.

What this exposure does is maximize the information to the sensor. It most likely ends up with something that looks overexposed, it is much easier to pull down the exposure in post than pull it up - there simply isn't any information in the shadows. Remember we set the scene with minimal if none blown highlights.

If the scene can't be overexposed using this method it is time for an HDR effort or know that you will have blown/clipped highlights.

Again, with a bit of practice - just sit somewhere on a morning you are lounging and take 10 minutes to play with this and compare the settings and highlights of the same scene - it doesn't take hours and hours, just a few moments of attention to the topic and it will become 2nd nature.

He could also buy a Lee Filter Holder and a nice set of Singh-Ray Graduated ND's and get rid of the cokin's.

FWIW unless I am trying to take a particular picture of a particular subject I use the Singh-Ray's, but most of the time I do my own version of what Busted described. In Squidy's particular case I like the building it is very interesting, I probably would have set up the filters on the camera.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Dave Throgmartin

That's a really tough scene. This one might beg for HDR - the shot you have here exposed for the sky and another with the house/ground exposed properly.

As is, for this image to work out it would appear to require a significant brightening of the house/ground.

Dave

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Agreed......many times there is too much dynamic range in a scene to capture it with one exposure....HDR or a variant of it is he most obvious answer. Sometimes you can get by with just one exposure for the foreground and one for the sky and just blend them in photoshop without doing complete HDR tone mapping.

Looks to me to be "Spot" metered. On the 6D I believe spot metering is only on the center point. If you focused with the center point (like was discussed in a previous thread), and then recomposed, that would put the center point right in the clouds... and the clouds look perfectly exposed. If it was evaluative metering, then I think it would have been marginally better. But that is all speculation at this point, you can easily confirm with the EXIF data.

As others have said, you took the time to set up for the picture... so you should have put the GND filter on. I understand the comment about low quality of Cokin, but they also work and will cause less noise or distortion that you are going to get pulling the building out of the shadows in post processing. Or if you expose the building properly, you are going to lose the nice character the clouds bring to the shot. I had Cokin for many years before I got a Lee holder... and I did that to get to a 4"x6" system for wider shots. I produced many good shots with Cokin and my 7D, and I have no regrets. Cokin may not be the best, but if it is what you can afford, then it is a far better choice than trying to produce the same effect in post processing and the associated noise that comes with it. The 6D is much better than older cameras, and as cameras get better I may change my opinion on the use of GND vs PP; but that is not the case at this time (IMO).

One caveat to what I said above. If you are trying to shot 24mm or less on a FF camera, then the standard Cokin will not work - you need the wider version. Not sure which one you have.

Pat

With an image like that it is a tough call whether to use a filter which will partly cover the house if kept horizontal, only cover part of the sky if used on an angle, or take two exposures to blend in post. Even with a brighter exposure those shadows would be wanting to be brightened up to suit most people's tastes I expect unless you were willing to blow out the highlights in the sky which would lose a lot of the drama there from a dark'n'stormy day.
At the end of the day it would probably be the most flexible to choose to blend two images. Far easier to get the exposures where you want them for each part this way. Provided of course that you have the software to do so and a desire to work this way.
One other menu item that can affect exposures is highlight tone priority. It can shift exposure values to protect the highlights in most of the operating modes. May be worth checking to see if it is on in your camera as it would cause a similar result to what you experienced.

There is one option getting overlooked.

The old old school method. It is time.
Waiting for that right moment where the sky and the house are within a few stops of each other.
Ideally in this instance it might be the house front lit and the sky in the background maybe 1 stop less.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by HDNitehawk

There is one option getting overlooked.

The old old school method. It is time.

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I can't find the time slider in Photoshop. Which tab is it under? ;)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DavidEccleston

I can't find the time slider in Photoshop. Which tab is it under? ;)

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It is there if you can find it. The longer you look for it the more effect it will have. It progresses very slowly. For every 1 minute of time you slide it forward it takes 1 minute to update. It is a 1 to 1 conversion.

A little update on the ETTR and blinkies - the blinkies are a jpg conversion of the raw, typically you can get a bit more out of the raw file than the jpg conversion.

Thanks for the advice so far, really appreciated.

Yes, the Cokin are fairly lower quality, but I actually didn't have them with me at the time or I would have tried.

In regards to Lee etc I would love to buy the holder but in AU that kind of stuff is very expensive. The Lee holder (yes, just the holder) is actually over the price of a full set of Cokin's here.

Well if we are going to talk 'old school' shall we mention the possibilities for capturing that image on B&W film after carefully spot metering and then adjusting the development time to make the most of the possibilities for shifting the shadow values up to where we want them to be? Every now and then that extra step of developing the negative in the middle of the process with film made so much more possible than many folks realize. And it was perfectly acceptable for focus to be a little soft and for there to be grain in our prints! Would that be considered heresy now?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Squidy

In regards to Lee etc I would love to buy the holder but in AU that kind of stuff is very expensive. The Lee holder (yes, just the holder) is actually over the price of a full set of Cokin's here.

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If you'd have said something before, I could have bought the LEE here and brought it to AU for you...I'm headed there soon. :p

Stephen