I may be a little slow... Exposure

I recently shot pics of my daughters baseball game. All shot in RAW. All shot in Tv mode at 1/1600 and f-stop 5.0 to 5.6, metering all Pattern. The pics I took with the sun behind me look fine as is. The pics with the sun in front of me are all darker then I would like. When I bring them into PS the I need to adjust the exposure 2 stops for these to look good and similar to the others. I don't understand what I should be doing to adjust this as I take the pictures. Do I really need to make the exposure adjustment in camera? Do I have something else set wrong? Why does the picture come out under exposed when I face the light versus away from teh light. Thanks...

DReb-MO wrote:
I recently shot pics of my daughters baseball game. All shot in RAW. All shot in Tv mode at 1/1600 and f-stop 5.0 to 5.6, metering all Pattern. The pics I took with the sun behind me look fine as is. The pics with the sun in front of me are all darker then I would like. When I bring them into PS the I need to adjust the exposure 2 stops for these to look good and similar to the others. I don't understand what I should be doing to adjust this as I take the pictures. Do I really need to make the exposure adjustment in camera? Do I have something else set wrong? Why does the picture come out under exposed when I face the light versus away from teh light. Thanks...

You are in a back lit situation. The camera's meter is seeing all of the light
coming in from behind your subject and it thinks that this is what you are trying
to photograph. Anything in the foreground would have less light on it and will
be underexposed often to the point where it looks like a silhouette.

You need to make your camera expose for the foreground and that means using
a manual exposure and opening up a stop or two from what the meter is telling
you. And yes, this will overexpose the background, but it’s the subject in the
foreground that matters.

Or you could maintain the same exposure and use flash to push some light into
the foreground. That fill flash technique is only appropriate when you are close
enough to the subject so the flash has some effect.

Thanks for the info. So would I zoom into the subject and fill the frame and lock exposure then zoom to compose?

You could do a meter reading that way but locking implies that you need to compensate after each shot.

You need to get off of the mindless automatic settings where the camera does all of the thinking. The only three settings that I ever use are fully manual, Tv (shutterspeed priority) and Av (aperture priority).

If you selected Tv, you'd select a shutterspeed with the top dial of the camera and the camera would pick what it thinks is the appropriate aperture to combine to a "correct" exposure. If I was using Tv I'd take a shot and then have a hard look at the review and with the Histogram enabled. Now I could use the dial on the back of the camera to bias the exposure. Using that to "overexpose" by some amount (2/3 of a stop?) I'd take another shot and review that. I'd do this until I was pretty confident that my subject exposure was good. Then I'd just shoot. If I changed my shooting position then I'd reevaluate my base exposure.

As I stated I was in Tv mode and was relying on the camera to set the aperture correctly for exposure. BTW, I have a 300D and do not have a dial on the back of the camera, but I think I understand. I do use the Histogram to review the shots as they are taken but was wondering whether to adjust the exposure up as needed or switch to manual and open the aperture?

Sorry about that. Is hould have read your first post more carefully.

There should be a control for affecting your exposure. On the 10D, it's the dial on the back. I'm pretty sure that it's on the back (a button rather than a dial) of the 300D but you'll have to check your instruction book.

Once you find it you would just "dial" in the exposure bias that you want and leave it there, at least until your shooting or subject pposition changes. It also looks like there's a back light compensation button on the back of the 300D as well. Just pushing that in will cause an over exposure (probably a stop and a half) and that's good to try for the occasional backlit shot, but if I was doing a bunch then I'd rely on the bias, as above.

You could change to manual and do it all by hand, but I do like the Tv/Av automatics. Because they only pick either the aperture or shutterspeed, but not both, it means that I have to keep my head in the game. But automatics are just faster than I am if the lighting changes very quickly, like the sun going behind a cloud, and will react must faster than I can.

on the 300D you hold down the "exposure compensation" button whilst turning the main dial to dial in an amount over or under exposure amount. be careful as this will stay until you set it back to the centre.

the exposure compensation button is just to the top right corner of the LCD display and is labeled "Av +/-".

hope that helps.

Thanks for all the responses. I hope to get this mastered some day soon!