February, 2010 | Photocrati

Q and A: Why does my camera produce severe underexposure in dark locations?

Question

Can you help me solve the exposure problem with my new digital SLR camera? It’s fine when I use the fully automatic modes. But I tried taking photos in a church during a wedding (without flash) and all my photos were underexposed. I was using ISO 400 and set the shutter speed to 1/500 sec. in Shutter Priority mode to make sure the photos would be sharp. But they are all too dark. D.M.

Answer

This is also a common problem among students in my BetterPhoto courses when they first try night photography. The answer is simple, but you need to fully appreciate how this semi-automatic mode works. (more…)

Shooting Sports 2 – Courts – Volleyball and Basketball

In my first article, I talked about some general considerations in shooting sports – the gear, the camera settings, etc. If you haven’t taken a look at that article yet, you should read it before this one.

In this article, we’ll discuss some of the considerations specific to shooting court sports — volleyball, and basketball. These are usually indoors, but the same principles apply when they are played outside.

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The Tuesday Composition: Live from Iceland!

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

I’m about five days into a trip through parts of Iceland (yes, in January and February), and thought I would share couple of short thoughts that have come up this week as I’ve been working, along with a few unfinished images from the trip.

First, yes, it is in fact cold here. Most of the areas I’ve been working in are relatively coastal (save for the Myvatn area), and so temperatures aren’t quite as cold as you might think: The coldest temperatures I’ve worked in this trip have been about -13C (or 9 degrees F). I’ve worked at lower temperatures in Mono Lake. Still, it is noticeably brisk. One thing that’s been on my mind, as a result, is thinking about how to communicate the sense of that cold in an image.

In most of my images on this trip, communicating “cold” has come down to one of two ideas (or both)–color, and the presence of ice or snow.
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