Overexposed!

Forums Forums Get Technical Tips & Tricks Overexposed!

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  • #2805
    bender16v
    Participant

    I have been working a lot this spring and summer so I haven’t been able to participate in the contests as much as I would like. The upside is that I finally got paid and bought a new 70-200 f2.8 lens and a 1.7 teleconverter to pair with it. It was the most versatile and affordable way for me to get a ~500mm (crop sensor) f4.8 lens. I have been using it for a little over a week and have been having a few issues with overexposure that I’ve never had before as you can see in these photos.

    With birds I normally shoot in Aperture Priority because they move around so much that I’m not fast enough in Manual to adjust to them. I believe that I just need to dial down the exposure compensation more but my question is do you have lenses that as soon as you put them on you know that you need to do this? I’m also not really seeing the highlights being blown out in the histogram either but maybe I’m not reading it properly. I’m wondering if it could be some other setting I have made in the camera that is causing this so any tips would be appreciated, thanks.

    Edit: On both birds the heads are blown out. It’s not a big area, but I don’t like the loss of detail.

    #48942
    ravnostic
    Participant

    Do you have photoshop or elements? I do believe ‘recovery’ will completely take care of this, and IINM, fall within the rules of farktography. And then there’s always shooting in shadow (cloudy skies or otherwise), or with the light much much closer to the horizon.

    #48943
    bender16v
    Participant

    Yes, I just tried Recovery and the software says that it isn’t overexposed anymore but there still isn’t any detail in those areas. It just seems strange to me that it’s only with this lens combo that I’ve had this issue. It is very rare that I see bald eagles in the wild like that and I’m not happy that I screwed up, I guess I should have bracketed it. I’m trying to learn about nature photography I’m not even sure if I shouldn’t have tried using a flash to even out the light.

    #48944
    CauseISaidSo
    Participant

    Have you tried using spot exposure and exposure-locking on a bright region (head/neck) instead of evaluative or center-weighted? Anything to narrow down the area you want the camera to calculate exposure on.

    Also, your camera likely has a feature where it’ll flash any overexposed areas in red (maybe in playback mode only, but that’ll allow you to correct for your next shots). That might be more helpful than a histogram given the small area we’re talking about.

    #48945
    bender16v
    Participant

    I’ll check into that. Hopefully I can get up early tomorrow and go for a walk in one of the local parks and find something. Thanks!

    #48941
    linguine
    Participant

    Do you have the same problem with overexposures when you’re just using the new lens without the teleconverter?

    #48946
    bender16v
    Participant

    I’m not really sure. I’ll try next time without it and see how that looks. I went out this morning and found a hawk in the woods and I did -.7 and -1 but the situation was completely different since it was very shady and I even used a flash. I’m happy with underexposing since I don’t lose detail. Hawk

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