For every image I’m happy with, I’ve shot many, many more that I’d be embarrassed to show my fellow camera club members. Often my foto failures are obvious: wrong aperture (for the situation), wrong shutter speed, distracting background, wrong camera settings (forgot to check them first). But sometimes I am just stumped and have no idea what I did wrong.
In the spring of 2008 I shot senior pictures for my niece who lives in Minnesota. Most were shot on a cloudy morning, a lighting situation I felt I could handle well. She and her parents loved the pics. But before we headed back to Milwaukee, her dad had the idea to shoot a few more with her posing by an antique piece of farm equipment.
It was high noon, in bright sunlight. She was wearing a cowboy hat to keep the sun out of her eyes. With the sun above and a little behind her, I wanted to use fill flash to keep shadows off her face, but I also wanted to shoot at f2.0 to throw the background out of focus. I was using a Nikon D50, 50mm f1.8 lens, and the pop-up flash. The result was an overexposed photo. And I had no idea what had gone wrong.
It took me several weeks to figure out my mistake. I found the clues in the EXIF data. What’s that? Every time you shoot a digital picture, not only does your camera record the image itself but it also makes record of all the camera settings in place at the moment you press the shutter. If you create a foto failure, you can learn from your mistake by examining this saved data. You’ll need some software to display it. I use ViewNX, a free download from Nikon. Click the Metadata tab on the left side of the screen (in ViewNX) to see it. If you’re not a Nikon shooter, you may want to try Opanda Exif Viewer, also a free download.
I put my detective
hat on and examined the clues: Aperture: f2. Shutter speed: 1/500 (the maximum flash synch speed for a Nikon D50). Flash: TTL, front curtain synch.
I was asking my camera to do the impossible. Bright sunlight + f2 + flash = too much light. Had I not used flash, the camera probably would have chosen a shutter speed of 1/2000 at f2.
Solutions I didn’t think of at the time: 1) In bright sunlight, use a reflector instead of fill flash. 2) Use a Neutral Density filter and/or a polarizer to cut the light entering the camera. 3) In bright light, don’t shoot at a wide aperture, try f4, f5.6 or f8 instead. Don’t try to blur the background if you want to use fill flash on a sunny day.
Fortunately I had shot in RAW + Jpeg and was able to recover a usable image despite my mistake. A lesson learned.
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Download a free copy of Nikon View NX from:
http://support.nikontech.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/16692
Download a free copy of Opanda Exif Viewer from:
