Where am i going wrong? Am I going wrong?

All my life I've always used Pentax cameras. I've a K20D just now which I love (loved?). I've progressed from shooting everything in Green mode to setting my own aperture or shutter speed in Av or Tv modes. I still use multi-segment metering and AF.C focussing.

My shots are always a bit dark / under-exposed but over time I've learnt to compensate (I've EV 'permanently' set to +0.5 stop) either on the camera or by adjusting in Lightroom after.

I was quite happy until I gave my wife a Canon Powershot for her birthday. We've just come back from a holiday where we ended up taking quite a few shots of the same or similar scenes. She taking everything in auto mode and me largely in Av (but still with EV +0.5).

I've been very impressed with the quality of her exposures!

Looking at her shots and my own in Lightroom it's obvious from the histograms that her exposures are more balanced with the majority of my shots showing a graph with more data over the left hand side.

I've posted a few examples in Flickr here - http://www.flickr.com/photos/surgenor/sets/72157632863513223/detail/

The shots are nothing great but they're unaltered from the camera (other than mine are JPEG exports from RAW) just to illustrate the point.

Is the problem me or the camera? Or is it time for me to drop back to a 'point and shoot' myself?

To my eyes, the ones shot with the K20D are way, way better than the ones with the Powershot. There doesn't look to be too much wrong with the exposures, maybe a little dark in the shadows but this is far preferable to blowing out skies which the Canon has managed to do brilliantly!

I think you just need to process your RAW files a little more carefully to draw out shadow detail and retain the lovely richness in the colours that your samples display.

Regards
David

To me the canon shots look mostly overexposed to my tastes.

The pentax ones do seem a bit dark and consistently so - maybe the metering is a little out. Try shooting at +1 and see what you think.

I do like the pentax ones though

Hi Malcolm,

The general wisdom with digital is the opposite of film ie over expose film to draw shadow detail while burnt out in digital is hard or impossible to recover so if anything slightly underexpose and play with later. Most recently I've started to play with grad ND filters to keep th change from dark land to light sky within 4 or 5 stops in landscapes.

I had a Canon G9 some years ago and found it easily burnt out skies which I couldn't recover (very typical of small sensored cameras it seems, My Minolta A200 before that did the same. 1412 sky is burnt out, yours isn't. 1123 looks washed out including again the sky.Yours doesn't. I've found my KX, KR and K5 vastly superior.

On the railway pic Some of the colour difference may be down to the character of a particular lens. There are plenty of lens experts on here who know a lot more about that.

Finally how bright is your monitor as you may be seeing more 'darkness' in your images than some of us. The grey scale at the bottom of this forum may tell if yours is too bright.

I've just noticed in the EXIF data of those shots posted in Flickr it shows "Exposure bias 0 EV". Is that not where I should see "0.5 EV"?

When I hold down the EV Compensation button (the +/- square one) it shows +0.5 in the bottom right hand of the view finder.

Edit - oops I seem to have been beaten to the punch so to speak - oh well what I typed is below;

As mentioned above it is best not to blow highlights as you can always raise the shadows and lighten them up but blown highlights are blown and most of not all info is recoverable.

I believe a saying with film was expose for the highlights and the shadows will take care of themselves - to a point this seems true of digital - by 'to a point' I mean that in high contrast situations the differences may be too high requiring the use of nd grads etc to balance the exposure.

Try tweaking the shadows and highlights of your example shots and all should become clear


Also if you shoot raw you should have more 'headroom' with which to play

Hope this helps

Stu

I absolutely agree.

I mostly shoot manual and bracket - no reason not to bracket with digital - especially if it's a one off.

I'm not up to speed with the mid tone stuff but I mostly shoot in manual and take the cameras metering as a staring point/suggestion and with experience sometimes even start off a stop or two away from what the camera thinks is right.

Wow, thanks guys - such speedy responses. Appreciated. Lots of food for thought.

I'm glad some of you agree they're a little dark but as I say I had got used to 'sorting' that in Lightroom. I agree the Powershot shots are not perfect but I was initially impressed with them...

John - I'll have a look at linking exposure lock to the AF point - I hadn't initially understood how that worked but having re-read the manual I can see that might help.

Bill - whilst I do calibrate my monitor (Spyder3) I don't see all 16 shades below which would suggest my monitor is too bright. Taking brightness to 0 on my monitor I still can't differentiate between the extreme left hand 4 or 5 squares. I'll try a re-calibration but would darkening my screen further not worsen the problem with shots?

Thanks again everyone...

PS - posted above after reading up to reply 4 Still little jet lagged after our return so off to bed now and will digest other replies tomorrow when head is clearer!

Having previously owned the K20D I distinctly remember having +0.7ev dialed in pretty much all the time and still not blowing highlights, unfortunately the K20 doesn't handle noise nearly as well as the K5 so I think the "shoot to the right" guideline is still quite useful for that model

Simon

Same here. Tend to use 0, +.3 +.7 ... Quite often it will be the +.3 that I will choose but some people like their colours blown out and the .7 caters for them.

It might also be worth checking your monitor - in my experience most monitors are overly bright and on the (admittedly just two) occasions I've used a calibrator it's dialled the brightness down significantly. Given that the Powershot is very much a consumer product it may be optimised for 'out-of-the-box' monitors?

No knowledge - just speculation.

try the 16 different shades below to see if your monitor is calibrated ...
[quote:3496ace15f="SkyRider"]It might also be worth checking your monitor - in my experience most monitors are overly bright and on the (admittedly just two) occasions I've used a calibrator it's dialled the brightness down significantly. Given that the Powershot is very much a consumer product it may be optimised for 'out-of-the-box' monitors?

quote]