What's up duck?

I love the subject - a pair of ducks setting sail on a rubber ring! Makes me smile. They could do with a third chum on the other side of the ring to counter-balance in case the water gets rough

Regards

Hello Mat! Thanks! I was smiling when I saw them as well... But do you think I should change my camera settings? I took this on a morning and it was sunny but all my shots of these ducks were dark...

It's hard to tell... and I am no expert (!), but the exif says you used centre weighted metering, which is what I tend to use myself... maybe the camera is picking up bright reflections from the rubber ring in the centre of the shot and trying to compensate for them and avoid burning those highlights out, meaning the background, which is quite a bit darker and more evident around the edge of the picture (i.e. less relevant for the metering used) looks even more dark. That said, I am sure you could redress the effect with post-processing in something like Photoshop or PS Elements. If you shot as a RAW you could adjust the exposure using a RAW file manipulator, or if a .jpeg you could try adjusting the image using 'levels' and 'lighten shadows/darken highlights' and tools like that... If wanting to adjust the way the picture was taken for future reference, you could consider bracketting exposures (taking three shots, with one notionally over- and one notionally under-exposed) - I would have thought the K-X has that function, or you could dial in some compensation to recognise the way the camera's metering works, or shoot with matrix (green setting) metering - maybe have a play and see what works best...

Hope that helps. A bit

Regards

Beautiful pic and beautiful portfolio
Giulio57

Thank you Giulio! Your portfolio is beautiful as well especially the colours...

Lowela