Shooting in Cloudy/Grey conditions

[winmazing]

When there's no blue sky and just overcast, what kind of settings do you use on your camera in terms of aperture/shutter speed and others? I find that the colors in my pictures end up washed out and overexposed.

[sgogula]

I think you need to understand the camera metering. Here is one such thread which talks about that: understanding metering (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=335569&highlight=understanding+metering)

[Travis Ingle]

This probably won't help you much but when I shoot in these condition I often do it with the mindset that I will be processing the photos as B&W which helps me when I am looking for a good composition. Sorry if this isn't of any help but figured I would just throw it out there.

[canonnoob]

depends on what you shooting.... when I shot college football two weeks ago I was on AV mode, but yeah...

[DStanic]

You could try using a circular polarizer, it may help bring some color to the skies etc. As Travis said sometimes shooting in B&W will yield more interesting results.

[tonylong]

When there's no blue sky and just overcast, what kind of settings do you use on your camera in terms of aperture/shutter speed and others? I find that the colors in my pictures end up washed out and overexposed.

It depends on what you are after. Frequently you have a dim background and a somewhat light overcast. If you don't mind the sky being quite bright, you can just set your camera to get a "good" exposure of the foreground. Just note that the sky will tend to be blown. You can tone down the highlights (especially if you're shooting RAW) but you'll lose detail there.

If you want to retain detail in the sky, you will need to factor the overcast into your exposure (probably exposing it to say a bit lighter than +1 EV using Manual or locking in exposure compensation), you face the dilemna of likely underexposing the foreground, which has the hazard of either looking too dim in the final pic or needing to amp up the whole foreground in PP.

Sometimes the overcast will be darker than "medium" and could cause the camera to overexpose the foreground to lighten the sky.

So, there are several possible scenarios and different ways in approaching them The method is up to you, but my advice when facing this dilemna is to shoot in RAW and use a low ISO to give you the most latitude in balancing things out in PP, then use your best judgement in balancing out your exposure for the various "zones".

A couple days ago I encountered this type of situation where I wanted to retain detail in the sky and had a dim foreground of fall colors. You can see my results in this post (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showpost.php?p=6531078&postcount=3836).