figuring out "rough guess" at exposure without "live view"

There is nothing wrong with Live View as follows:

-Macro photography
-Night photography of the moon when you want to precisely focus the lens (after it has settled down or matched the ambient temperature)

thanks. as has been said before, it's fun learning. the 2nd pic above (of my daughter's face) was one of my "first weekends using the xsi" pics, so i got lucky with that one. :laugh:

here's a shot i took of a squirrel out on our back deck the other day (thru the patio door and storm door)...... (was an overcast day)

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dipps wrote in post #7770602
thanks. as has been said before, it's fun learning. the 2nd pic above (of my daughter's face) was one of my "first weekends using the xsi" pics, so i got lucky with that one. :laugh:

here's a shot i took of a squirrel out on our back deck the other day (thru the patio door and storm door)...... (was an overcast day)

Hmm...on my monitor that shot looks underexposed by about a stop.

How does it look to you if you bump the exposure in your image processing program (DPP, Photoshop, or whatever) by one stop? If you have to bump the exposure, you might have to bump the contrast as well to get it to "pop".

It may be that your monitor needs calibration. You can pick up a Pantone Huey for something like $60 from Amazon. It is easily worth the money. On top of color calibrating your monitor so that colors look correct, it periodically adjusts the brightness of the display to suit the ambient lighting conditions. If you want to see how your shots look to other photographers, it's the way to go.


Note that I wasn't there when you took the shot. It's entirely possible that the conditions really were that dark and that the shot you got is an accurate representation of what the scene looked like.

Of course, for most of us, what we're after is shots that look good, even if they don't necessarily look exactly like the scene did to the naked eye. The camera already does that to some degree: it's somewhat limited in dynamic range so it tends to act as a contrast multiplier for the dynamic range of the scene it's able to capture.

After you've done the back and forth between shooting and looking at shots for a while, you tend to learn what relative exposure values to use when spot metering a scene. You may also find it helpful to meter several bits of the scene to get a feel for how much dynamic range you're trying to capture. But in the end, whatever part of the scene you feel is most important is the part you want to get the metering correct for.


EDIT: if you set "IMAGE EDITING OK" in your forum preferences, I can take the shot you took and show you what I think looks good, and I'll tell you what exposure and constrast adjustments I made.

I agree. I think the squirrel shot is about a stop underexposed.

i dont know what kind of 40D your talking about but mine has LV.

yes, here on my laptop, appears a bit underexposed. then again, it was a cloudy day, overcast, so it could very well accurately represent the conditions at the time (which is what i oftentimes aim for, right wrong or indifferent).

i've got a pantone huey that i got from woot.com for $50, but i've been neglecting the "recalibrate" reminders for the past couple days. one other issue is that i think my samsung monitor may be a tad under par for REAL image processing work (it's great for games though, lol).

got it. working on that.

done dealio.

dipps wrote in post #7773987
yes, here on my laptop, appears a bit underexposed. then again, it was a cloudy day, overcast, so it could very well accurately represent the conditions at the time (which is what i oftentimes aim for, right wrong or indifferent).

And, as it happens, only you really know whether the shot you see is what you saw in real life...

Well, that means your monitor is probably in the ballpark. Guess it depends on just how long it's been since you've recalibrated it. I'd also note that the brightness/contrast settings need to be as close to correct as possible prior to calibration for it to really work well.


Anyway, now that you've allowed image editing, here's what I get when I set it up to look good to me. I adjusted exposure +1.35, contrast +50, and blacks +10 in ACR:

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