I need advice and help

My camera is a Panasonic DMC-FZ30 and I use it in the point-and-shoot mode, with all settings on Auto. I took these pictures last weekend, about 1830. The sun was in the process of going down, but still very bright. You can see the light flares, even with the sun at my back. Then just as easily, these photos turned out well. I'm sure one of the settings is incorrect, but I need help. Any suggestions?

JP

Welcome JP!

Your first 4 are suffering from mild overexposure. The only thing that I can surmise, as long as your camera is on Auto, is the overexposure was caused by shooting into shadey conditions causing the bright areas to blow out. This is more an effect of the lighting and the limitations of the digital sensor than it is the function of your camera. You can probably save these with some digital editing. What happens is your camera brightens the image to take into account the fact that your subject is in the shade, and possibly backlit as well. This presumably is what's causing your overexposure here. In the future, I would watch your LCD screen after taking shots with a wide variation of lighting in the scene. If they look overexposed, like these, then you can include a little more sky in the image, depress the shutter halfway, causing it to darken the image for the sky, and then recompose the way you like it and shoot. That's the easiest work-around for your problem I can think of.

So I don't think it's your camera, I think it's the lighting scenario. But keep an eye on it just in case!

Good luck!
Rick

Thanks, walterick, I'll give that a try. Are you saying I should depress the shutter halfway while pointing toward the sky? Or toward the subjects?

JP

JP, just in case you're not familiar, depressing the shutter half way tells your camera to autofocus and set exposure for your shot. Then you actually take the shot by pushing the rest of the way down. Using this method, you'll tend to take better pictures over time than by pushing the button all at once.

Now, assuming you knew all that, in this case you would depress the button with a little more sky in the scene, causing the camera to underexpose a bit. Then point the camera back to your subjects and push the rest of the way down. This is a quick way of "tricking" the camera into taking a darker shot without getting into camera functions, menus, and such (which I highly recomend you do, by the way, in case you haven't yet!) But it is very important to say here that this is ONLY once you see that your camera is overexposing. In the majority of situations, just point and shoot and everything should work out fine!

You know, something just occured to me. Have you played with your meter function at all? It is possible that you have it set on Spot Meter which might give results like these. For Full-Auto shooting you want your meter set on "Average," "Matrix," or whatever name your camera gives to the computer-generated exposure method. If you're not familiar with metering then this can sound pretty confusing. But if you haven't played with the camera's settings at all then it shouldn't be a problem.

Please keep us updated as to your progress here and ask more questions. If there is a problem with your machine, we should be able to help figure it out with you. But I do think it was just tricky lighting and nothing more. I'm sure somebody more familiar with digital will chime in here before too long with a better (or different!) explanation than I gave!

GL!
Rick

Thanks again. After checking my settings, I discovered I did have it set to Spot metering. I changed it to what Panasonic calls Multiple metering, where "...the camera measures the most suitable exposure by judging the allocation of brightness on the whole screen automatically."

I did try using the method you described in order to "fool" the camera, but I can see how that would not work using Spot metering.

JP

A spot meter is a very useful tool in tricky lighting situations, but if you have it on that mode without realizing it the results won't be too good (yes, I've done it too :) ). Sounds like the mode you have it on now will work for most situations. Kind of like Nikon's Matrix mode or Canon's Evaluative mode.

These shots are challanging with any camera, but particularly a digital camera since the digital camera's sensor has about as much latitude as slide film. Not much, in other words, so your exposure range is about five stops. Since the important part of the picture is the subject, what I do in situations like this is drop the exposure on the main meter at least one and a half stops, and then shoot with flash, also dropped about 1/2 to 1 stop. This lights up the subject in a natural way, while bringing down the overall exposure so the background (in bright sun) isn't blown out. I posted an example of this technique a week or so in this forum in a post called "Bright sun, dark statue, hard shadows."