Dark Pictures in Shadow! Light Metering?

i recently went to a park with the wife and i tried to shoot a few pix of her sitting on a bench underneath a shaded tree.

her face came out dark, but the background was properly exposed. i tried bumping up the ISO to no avail in evaluative metering mode.

question is, what could i have done to properly expose the subject. other than fill flash, is there anohter way to get the right shot?

thanks.

Exposure Compensation. In Av Mode, Dial in positive exposure compensation. What you want to do is over expose the shot. Yes, the light background will be over exposed, but the subject in the shade will be properly exposed. Use the preview window to see who much to dial in. The same thing also works in Manual Mode. Practice helps.

Another option would be to simply spot meter on her face. Depending on her complextiom, you may still need to dial in som EC to nail the exposure.

Bumping the ISO has nothing to do with metering. The best thing to do here is just walk up close and meter your wife, take a picture, chimp the result looking at the histogram, set the camera on M with the f/stop and shutter speed of this image if it looked good or adjust accordingly. Now go back to the where you want to take the picture from and shoot away. Light or dark backgrounds mess things up every time.

jack

Hello! Fill flash. You need to fill using flash... all these other options will help and may overcome the ambient vs shadow, but fill flash will solve your problems almost every time. For the budget minded, make a reflector...

As mentioned before, exposure compensation will only get you a properly exposed subject with an overexposed background. Fill flash will allow you to bring up the exposure level of the subject while keeping the background properly exposed. Whether or not your flash has enough power to do that is another question.

(Finally, you could take on photo with the subject properly exposed and one with the background properly exposed and combine them in post processing)

As, the poster explained above, you can only have one or the other. Either the subject will be too dark or the background will be too light. Changes to the camera settings will change everything in the scene. You can't just change an area.

The two options you have are:

1-Fill flash
2-Reflect some existing light using a reflector, a bit of white paper, or anything that you can think of that will get more light on the subject without changing the colour of the light.