Help, taking photos with bright background.

sep9001

sep9001

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Kev
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Hi

What setting do I have to use in order to expose the person correctly when the back ground is very bright sunshine.

I am using my d90, with the tamron 17-50. I have tried av and manual but the person is being underexposed

I have tried the inbuilt flash, spot metering but no joy. Putting the camera on the portrait setting seem to do a better job with the flash.

Thank you
 
Picture taken with my phone of the location.

Thanks
 
Try holding your left hand in roughly the same spot as your subject's face will be, and pointing in the same direction as your subject.
Take a spot-meter reading from your hand in Av mode and transfer those settings to Manual mode (to stop the camera re-metering when you re-frame for the proper shot)
That should get you in the right ball-park to start fine-tuning.

Also, our location is super bright, on-camera flash will struggle against that much sun. You'd be better off getting some (preferably white) reflectors to bounce some light back at your subject.
 
Thanks, will try the left hand trick. Cannot use the reflectors as we are away in holiday.
 
Same as any other photograph, you need to expose for the subject. I'm suspecting your subject is in shade and the BG is in full sun?
Metering will struggle as it doesn't understand that the dark blob is your subject.

You can:
just use +exp compensation
take a spot reading from your subject or your hand in the same spot (bearing in mind the meter is still assuming 18% grey)

But both of those will expose your subject and leave the BG overexposed. Your real problem is balancing the lighting, and your guess with the pop up flash is spot on. But you might need to adjust the flash exposure comp to get it right (again, the meter has no idea what you're trying to do) The reason 'portrait mode' with the flash gets close is because you have told it what you want to do so it's making educated guesses.
 
Mr P,

Thank you, something else to try. Have limited WiFi so will try and see if I can get any info on how to change the onboard flash settings.
 
Blow the background out. Better the subject correctly exposed than the background....that's not the intention of the shot...can't really get brighter than this !

e.g.

EBY1xyr.jpg


gkhuTl2.jpg
 
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I really cant for the life of me think why you would take a spot metering of your hand when theres a face in the same place?

The answer your looking for is to over expose the shot..

Right now your backgrounds properly exposed but your subjects dark.. so you over expose the background and your subject will become lighter and properly exposed once you get it right... of course your background will be blown out as per raymond_lin above :)
 
Thanks for all the comments. For some reason changing the af point setting from dynamic to spot gave better results.

Need to read the manual to see what the difference is between the two.
 
Technically.....the overall scene will be way blown in accordance to the 18% grey calculation in camera.

You are just looking for correctly exposed subject.

Being nit picking.
 
KIPAX said:
I really cant for the life of me think why you would take a spot metering of your hand when theres a face in the same place?
Click to expand...

I meter off my hand too. The main reason being that your hand will always be the same complexion. Sometimes a scene may have a number of different complexions and skin tones. If you're used to how your own skin meters then you can apply that to every situation. It's also less intrusive if you're on a wide lens and don't want to get too close to someone to spot meter accurately.

I think there's two answers to the OP question.

You can expose for skin and blow out the background. Or you can underexpose with the intention of bringing back the shadow details later (if you shoot a recent nikon body this is a great option.)*

*Edit: just realised you're shooting a D90 so maybe this isn't for you.

Here's the same scene in the wedding I'm currently editing but with the two different options being used to different effect:

View attachment 21999 View attachment 22000
 
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