Steve Ingraham’s Point and Shoot Landscape

Snowy Egret: classic EV situation

White bird. Dark background. This is a classic situation where Program shooters need to think about Exposure Compensation. Somewhere in your menu system you should find the EV setting. On my Sony, it is one of the settings placed right along the bottom of the LCD. You don’t even have to go into the menu system to find it. On some cameras it is considered important enough to warrant a seperate button. 

EV settings (stands for Exposure Value) generally run from -2 to +2 and, unlike program shift (see In Praise of Program Shift), they do change the actual exposure of the image. Minus values decrease exposure from the Programed setting, making the whole image darker. Plus settings increase exposure above the Programed setting, making the whole image brighter. 

As we discussed in our earlier articles on the basic of exposure, there are always compromises in fitting the full range of dark and light that the eye sees into the limited range of tones which any photographic medium, including digital sensors, can record. 

In a shot like the one above, even the most sophisticated metering systems, if left on Program or Auto, will read and average the tones in the scene, attempting to the best fit. With this kind of shot, the exposure will be set so that the white of the bird entirely white…with no detail in the feathers, and no shades of gray or off-white. Just the way it works. 

To avoid that, I set the EV to -1.7, effectively shifting the center of the exposure range down almost 2 f-stops. This made the water darker than life, but it alowed the sensor to catch much of the detail in the white wings and body of the bird. Even so, the inner right wing is fully saturated…it has reached, and probably exceeded  the maximum brightness the sensor is able to record, and you don’t see any feather detail there. 

Setting the EV even lower would have caught some detail in the brightest areas, but at the expense of turning much of the white plumage gray. This is probalby the best balance that could be achieved, shooting jpeg with this particular camera. A DSLR shooting raw might have done slightly better, but this image would be a challenge for any camera.

And remember, it is not only white that can cause a problem. Any sufficiently bright and intense color may over-saturate the sensor. It is the pinks in the image below that were the problem.

Roseate Spoonbill: too pink

This shot was also taken at -1.7 EV.

So, when would you use +EV values. A classic case would be backlit subjects. 

Blacklit

For this particular image, I did not use EV compensation, but I could have. Instead I used spot metering to meter on the butterflies. It accomplished the same thing, increasing the exposure of the overall image and catching the detail in the foreground. Without it the sky would be deep blue (as it was in reality) and the butterflies would be lost in shadow.

I could have done the same thing in the shots fo the birds above. Spot metering would have exposed for the bird and let the background go dark.

So, which would you use: EV compensation or spot metering? That depends on how fast your subject is moving. Shooting the birds in flight at Sanibel, spot metering would be all but impossible. And spot metering is more difficult were the subject is not in the center of the frame. It can be done, either by locking exposure with the shutter release and re-framing, or by shifting the spot around (if your camera provides for that), but neither work well with moving subjects.

The Agave and butterflies were not going anywhere, so spot metering was an option.

EV compensation is a powerful tool, but it requires both a knowledge of how exposure works, and some experience of how your individual camera responds. It is definitely worth leaning to use. 

Spoonbills Clashing