Exposure Errors on Canon 5D

[floortester]

Hi All,

I am a newcomer to the site but have been snapping, for the want of a better word, for some 50 year. I must admit that the shots I took on film were better than those of today - some of them still enlarge well.

My problem is with my Canon 5D, sometimes it underexposes or uses such a slow speed [ that I do not notice in the viewfinder] that I get shakes or in the last shoot grossly overexposed. I generally use raw as it is a get out if you foul up a one time shot and I have noticed a difference betwenn the jpg sample - nearly white out and the raw which although over exposed could be salvaged. However it was not the quality I was looking for.

I was taking woodland panaramic shots of bluebells in dappled shape and overcast sun with the camera on a tripod with shutter priority & 200isa using a Sigma 12-24mm lens. The exif shows an exposure of 1/41 and f4.6 and a bias of f2.0 [where that comes from - I have no idea] and the jpg looks like I have shot into the sun, the raw not too bad but not worth printing. On a previous shoot of rhododendrons the exif with the same settings with a 20-35mm lens the exif shows f19.9 and 1/395 and a bias of F1.0, the picture was mainly black with only the flower showing, I could extract the background with the raw but again not that good. I went back 5 days later and used a Canon D9 compact with far superior results.

The 5D although you can twiddle, the auto exposure does not seem to as good as my SLR's of 40 years ago.

I noticed a post of "another" site which had the same problems with the same camera - so is it worth having it checked or anything I can test myself?

Any proposals welcome including "What a pl*******" why didn't you *******

Regards

Floortester

 

[Big Mike]

Welcome aboard.

Firstly, I think we will need more information. Can you post some example shots, along with the EFIF info?

Off the top of my head...I'd want to know what metering mode you are using. Did you have the EC (exposure compensation) set? What, if anything, is your method for getting the exposure that you want.

One of the biggest advantages of digital, is the instant feed back. So did you not see these problems right as you were taking the photos? Or maybe did they look OK on the LCD screen, but not on your computer? I'd want to know what brightness settings you have set on for your LCD screen on the camera...and I'd also want to know whether you have properly calibrated your computer monitor. Do you know how to use the histogram?

 

[Derrel]

This past summer I took my 5D and 24-105-L IS lens on a four-day saltwater fishing vacation, and briefly instructed my boatmates on how to zoom, frame, and shoot the camera. For several years, my boat camera has been a Nikon D70, with 3-D RGB Color Matrix light metering,and it has done well. This year, for some unexplained reason, I took the Canon 5D...what a huge mistake...on several sequences of salmon being hooked and fought and landed, the 5D totally,totally "blew out" scenes that had large expanses of green saltwater, even in RAW mode, rendering the scenes basically so grossly over-exposed that the final,adjusted images were fricking useless.

Honestly, the Canon 5D's light metering, being color blind as most Canon's on the market are, is horrible under certain circumstances...what I realized after allowing two of my friends to use the 5D was that the camera demands a LOT of user intervention and overriding...its light metering is quite "stupid" compared against what's possible with better engineered systems. The same issue applied to the 5D and its highly-centrally located AF system...the camera is very poor for fast-breaking action, since it has absolutely ZERO autofocusing coverage toward the edges of the frame, so the camera tends toward severe back-focusing with off-centered subjects when the camera is used to cover fast action where a subject is standing off to one side of the frame. I had several heartbreaking sequences (shot by my boatmates) where the 5D's color-blind metering AND center-area-only AF ruined priceless photos that one of the "amateur" Nikons would have handled effortlessly, simply because they have better light metering, and wider AF coverage across more of the frame. Your instance of exposures fluctating wildly is similar to mine on that fishing trip....simply HUGE variations. Again, the Canon 5D is not a very "smart" camera, and it needs quite a bit of user experience and overriding in terms of its light metering performance on "some" subjects. Its performance in a saltwater marine environment for example, is very poor, compared with other cameras I've used over the last two decades.