blown out sleeves

Under these circumstances, I wouldn't even worry about it. No one's really going to be concentrating on his sleeves. At least not if the photo captures a great moment.

You do what you can within the limitations of digital and don't sweat the small stuff.


From a technical perspective, turning down the contrast in-camera can help if you don't want to shoot RAW.

black_z wrote in post #6355037
It's funny how some people say to underexpose and others say to overexpose!

Just my opinion here, but I think this is one of those "film to digital" things. I'm not sure of the exact terminology here so if I'm saying this wrong, please forgive me but in the days of film, people were told to "expose for the shadows" because if you lost shadow detail with film, basically it was just gone. Film had/has a much higher latitude(?) to highlights than it does for shadows. Digital on the other hand is just the opposite. Because of the way that a digital sensor works, there is an absolute limit to how bright highlights can be before they "blow out" and as with shadows in film, once the detail is lost, it's just lost...in otherwords, with digital you should expose for the highlights.

Personally because of what I shoot (mainly critters and such) and the way I shoot (often "on the fly") I don't really have time or desire to be thinking too much about exposure per say. If I'm standing there trying to take a picture of a fox for example and I'm trying to calculate the "optimum exposure"...chances are I've already missed my shot. Because of this with highlights and digital, as I said before, I usually have my Exposure Comp bumped down just a bit to under expose the image just a little and thus, in most cases, preserve the highlight detail. It's just easier with digital to brighten up a dark image a little as apposed to trying to recover highlight detail that's no longer there. There certainly are extremes in both cases, be it film or digital, where you can go too much, but my main goal is simply to get the shot "in the ball park" and fix anything else later in pp.

Peace,
Jim