Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clovishound" data-source="post: 834088" data-attributes="member: 50197">Just because the meter says it's the correct exposure, doesn't make right. When you have a scene that has a large difference between the lightest parts of the scene, and the darkest, there will be portions that are either under or overexposed. In this case you have a lot of the scene that is in deep shade, and part of the scene that has brightly lit leaves. The meter tries to balance those, but since the majority of the scene is darker, it averages out to being close to the darker part. Now comes the problem of how to fix it. If you expose for the highlights, the rest of the scene may be way too dark. Something in the middle may be the answer, but you will likely have to balance things in post processing (editing). As a general rule, over exposed highlights are more of a problem than underexposed shadows. Those are routinely referred to as "blown out highlights" They can look rather awful. Deep shadows can often still contain a fair amount of detail that can be brought out in post editing. Dark shadows also don't look as bad as blown out highlights.I normally "fix" this kind of problem by underexposing the scene by 1 to 3 stops based mainly on experience.  The good news is that with a mirrorless camera, the viewfinder will be able to clue you in to overexposed highlights, or underexposed shadows. With a little practice, you should be able to bring your exposure down until you start to see some detail in the highlights, and still retain detail in the shadows, if the difference is not too great.If you have the luxury of time, you can always bracket your exposures. This is a technique where you take a series of images of the same subject using progressively more and/or less exposure from that indicated by the camera. Your camera also has an auto bracketing feature where you can program the camera to take a series of exposure with a single press of the shutter button. You can choose the number of shots and increments of exposure compensation. For example: you can set it to take 5 shots at 1 stop increments. It will automatically take one at the meter setting, one at 1 stop over, one at 1 stop under, one at 2 stops over, and one at 2 stops under. You can then choose the best exposure later, when you can look at them on your computer. Another option is to make an HDR merge from the bracketed images. If you have software capable of doing that it will take the best exposure of parts of the scene from each image and (hopefully) seamlessly merge them into one well balanced image. Obviously, this doesn't work well with moving subjects, but can yield great results with landscapes and other static scenes.</blockquote>

Verification