D80 exposure questions.

[domromer]

I've had my d80 less than a week and have been taking a lot of bad photos with it. It's metering systems doesn't seem to handle contrasty scenes as well as my cannon is3. In the evening I usually go into the backyard and take sunset pics of my garden and chickens. With the is3 I would get nice pics of the golden light and nice shadows. With the D80 I seem to get totally opaque shadows and blown out light areas. I've tried a few different exposure modes and keep getting the same results. It's frustrating going from getting great pics from a 200$ p&s to getting horrible results from a 900$ SLR. Is the learning curve usually this steep when starting with a digital SLR, it's not like I'm new to photography. I've been shooting digital since 2000, and before that I was shooting slides for 5 years on my eos 3. Uggh help, frustrated!

 

[&Denekamp]

Check if you have in 'in camera' contrast enhancing turned on. If so, turn it off I think.

Set your camera to shoot in RAW, and use the exposure compensation until the highlight are no longer burned out (check the histogram the camera can provide you with on the back screen).

Then, use the either the software provided with you camera or photoshop (or other, as long as it handles RAW files well) to bring out some more detail in the shadows.

Hope this helps,
Niels

 

[Garbz]

Ok just to see if I can understand what you are saying. In the P&S you get well exposed highlights and well exposed shadows, and in the D80 you get blown highlights and cut off shadows?

Some kind of dynamic range control problems it seems. I is likely the canon is automatically processing to compensate for the huge dynamic range for the scene. Firstly in the D80 adjust the image properties to reduce contrast, then expose for the highlights, try to balance how many highlights you want blown and how much detail you want in the shadows. In the end something has to give, but you can recover shadows but not highlights.

Beyond that if you still haven't gotten what you want then as above shoot in RAW mode which gives you at 12bits/pixel image instead of 8bits. This gives you a bit of a boost in quality if you go into photo editing software and adjust the curves or levels to bring out the shadows.

In any event remember point and shoots are basically idiot boxes. They try to do as much as possible so the user only needs to click. SLR cameras are geared to those who like to have more control, so a little bit of effort (mind you well worth the results) needs to be put in.

 

[gmarquez]

I've had pretty good results shooting sunsets...however, there are cases where the scene's dynamic range is too much for the camera. If I remember right, my D80, Coolpix, and Easyshare all perform pretty similarly with sunsets (ie none of them handle extreme dynamic range without blowing out and/or going to black). As was suggested, shooting in RAW should allow you a little more leeway, but without posting the same scene taken with both cameras, I couldn't really tell you what is going on.