Exposure

drbondod · Aug 21, 2011

Have a new Nikon D700 with a Nikon 24-120/f4. Shooting in program mode I had several images that the camera automatically chose f4 and my depth of field was very limited for what I was shooting. I switched to aperture priority mode and bumped it up to f16. However, my images are now way under exposed. Any suggestions?

D-B-J · Aug 21, 2011

Don't shoot at f16. You need a lot of light to shoot at f16. Raise the iso of your camera if you want to shoot at F16.

KmH · Aug 21, 2011

F/16 is a really small aperture. Like D-B-J says something needs to change.

In aperture priority the shutter speed should change automatically by getting much slower to accommodate the small aperture setting, but if you didn't also change the ISO to auto that could be causing your problem.

You also don't mention what metering mode the D700 is set to.

How much experience do you have using a DSLR camera?

drbondod · Aug 21, 2011

KmH said:
F/16 is a really small aperture. Like D-B-J says something needs to change.

In aperture priority the shutter speed should change automatically by getting much slower to accommodate the small aperture setting, but if you didn't also change the ISO to auto that could be causing your problem.

You also don't mention what metering mode the D700 is set to.

How much experience do you have using a DSLR camera?

That was my problem. I didn't change my ISO. I had it still set at 200. I just bumped it up to 800 and it made the difference. Thanks.

Tomasko · Aug 21, 2011

There's no way to get way underexposed photos if you changed only the aperture in Aperture-priority mode. Camera would balance off anything (even the ISO KmH mentioned), so you would get slower shutter-speed and probably blurry image thanks to camera shake. Are you 1000% sure you didn't switch your camera to fully manual mode or didn't mess play with the exposure compensation?