technique help

[cypilk]

say..if i take a picture of something.. and the background is a lot brighter than the subject... if i would normall take the shot.. the picture would turn out to be a silouette (or however you spell it) ... and it goes the same way.. if the subject is a lot brighter than the background, the background would turn out to be "blackish" .. is there a way to compensate for this?

 

[ksmattfish]

For your first example you can use fill flash. Figure out your subject to camera distance, and set aperture for the flash. Then measure what shutter speed you will need to properly expose the background at that aperture. If you don't want them to expose evenly (often it is recommended to use 1 stop less fill flash for portraits where the sun is the key light) then adjust aperture to vary the exposure of your subject; adjust shutter to vary the exposure of the background. Keep flash sync speed in mind; too slow a sync speed can throw a monkey wrench into it on very bright, sunny days.

For your second example you'd need to illuminate the background in some way, or somehow reduce the light on the subject.

A third situation that you might run into is dark subject and dark background; you have a flash, but it will only illuminate the subject, and not the background. It works pretty much like fill flash, but your shutter speed will be very, very slow to get the proper exposure of the background. the flash will take care of the subject. This requires a tripod if you want the background to be sharp.