Help with dark pictures canon 70D

[BenjaminV]

Hello everyone,

I had a few questions;

I have a canon 70D camera, I was using it with a 10-18 f 4.5 -5.6 canon lens.

I was in a large grass field with mountains in the background and the sun setting behind them.

I was shooting in automatic and my pictures kept coming out really, really dark...

My question is ; what can I do to make the pictures come out brighter, with more even colors?

Imgur: The most awesome images on the Internet

that's one of the photos that I took. At the foreground, there's a large grass field, which in real time, is perfectly light, nice and bright, looked beautiful, but in the pictures I took, it came out pitch black almost...

What am I doing wrong?

I also took some pictures with my other lenses and all the pictures came out too dark...

Thanks to anyone who replies - please let me know if you have any questions

 

[weepete]

You've exposed for the sky. Basicaly a camera can only capture a limited range of brightness values (round about 1/2) of what our eyes can see. In your shot your camera has captured the bright sky but the landscape is much less bright so has turned out dark. The ways to get round this limitatation is to shoot one exposure for the sky and one for the landscape and combine them in post or use a graduated filter to darken the sky down to a similar level as the landscape. Sometimes you can also raise the shadows in post but canon sensors aren't as good as sony sensors and often introduce more noise in shadows.

 

[BenjaminV]

You've exposed for the sky. Basicaly a camera can only capture a limited range of brightness values (round about 1/2) of what our eyes can see. In your shot your camera has captured the bright sky but the landscape is much less bright so has turned out dark. The ways to get round this limitatation is to shoot one exposure for the sky and one for the landscape and combine them in post or use a graduated filter to darken the sky down to a similar level as the landscape. Sometimes you can also raise the shadows in post but canon sensors aren't as good as sony sensors and often introduce more noise in shadows.

Hmm... It sounds like this requires editing of the photos and such, which is something I have never done as I normally don't take any shots of this kind. I don't have any editing software of a clue on how to do it, lol.

So what you're saying is ; I have to take 2 pictures, one for the sky and one for the foreground - How do I even begin to do this ? I mean, how do I match the first picture I take to a second picture and have them come out the same? What kind of software do I need to do this?

I have an LG V20 phone and I'm sad to say that on my phone the pictures came out amazing - Nothing to do but point, focus and shoot... =\

Is there anything you suggest I read on how to take better landscape pictures?

Thank you for your reply, I appreciate you taking the time to do so

 

[weepete]

Ok, editing is pretty easy. Some programs like Adobe Lightroom have a built in HDR that will let you combine exposures. Normally you'd set up on a tripod and use the bracketing feature to alter shutter speed, though you can do it handheld if you slso use a high speed continuous shooting instead of one shot and if your lowest shutter speed is fast enough to be handheld (ROT 1/focal length).

There's a few different reasons why your phone has a different exposure, could be as simple as a different metering point that was used, or as complex as a different sensor and jpeg processing.

If you need to do it without software you'll need to learn how to use your cameras light meter and use the spot metering function to work out what the best exposure will be. If I'm being lazy sometimes I'll just meter the highlights and place the meter on 2 stops over, letting the shadows fall where they may.

For reading I'd recomend Scott Kelby's digital photography series, they were the books I personally liked the best though John Hedgecoe also has a good reputation on here for exellent books.

 

[table1349]

Cameras don't take stunning pictures, photographers do. You let the camera become the photographer with auto mode and the camera has no brain. The Solution is to learn photography.

Start by reading the camera manual cover to cover, twice. You need to know how to operate the camera including all the tools it has available to you.
Next learn about photography. This is a good tutorial: Digital Photography Tutorials
Practice what you learn as you are learning it. It will help you understand the tools you camera offers in real time as well as how to put those tools together to achieve what you want.
Third learn light: How To "Read" Light In Photography - Part 1 Photography is all about light.

 

[TCampbell]

You mentioned shooting on automatic. This is an area where you'll probably want to take more control over the exposure settings.

The tonal range of the image is very high - which is why when it's nicely exposed for the sky, the land is entirely too dark. There are several ways to fix this.

Your shot shows one issue where the camera exposes for sky and the foreground is dark. But the opposite problem is when the camera exposes for the foreground and then the sky ends up being too bright.

If the camera has enough exposure latitude (and the difference between foreground and sky aren't beyond the range of the camera) then you can split the difference. This means you manually meter the sky, check that reading... manually meter the ground, check that reading, then determine how many exposure stops (a stop is the doubling or halving of the amount of light) of exposure difference is between them and set the camera to expose half-way in between what you need for the sky vs. the foreground.

If you do that AND if you also use 'RAW' format (not JPEG) then you can usually adjust the exposure using computer software to come back to a balanced exposure.

Another technique is to simply expose for the foreground and use a lens filter to dim the sky. This is done with something called a "gradient" neutral density filter. It's not round... it's a rectangular filter and it slides into a holder that you attach to the front of the lens. Half of it is clear, the other half is tinted. You slide in the filter and look through the camera to get the tinted bit to cut down on the amount of light you're getting in the sky without darkening the foreground landscape. These filters come in various strengths that cut down on a mild amount of light (one stop) or quite a lot of light (perhaps 3 stops) and you can even stack them (e.g. I could use a 3 stop and a 2 stop stacked to get 5 stops).

But that method (using physical filters) means you're going to need to buy some extra equipment (namely the filters and filter holder) and by the time you the holder, the adapter ring that allows the filter to attach to your lens threads, and a set of filters... this would run hundreds of dollars.

So there's another method that takes advantage of the fact that these are "digital" images.

It turns out if the camera doesn't move between shots and nothing in the image is moving, you can use a tripod and take several images but each image is shot at a different exposure setting. This means some images have under-exposed areas, some have over-exposed areas. The computer can then combine the best exposed parts of each image to create a combined image where nothing is under-exposed or over-exposed. This is called high-dynamic-range photography or "HDR".

YOUR camera happens to have an HDR mode. You can read about it here:

Canon Knowledge Base - HDR (High Dynamic Range) Shooting (EOS 70D)

It turns out there's more than one way to combine the images and decide which parts of each image will be used in the final image. Some of these methods result in rather surrealistic results which have an artsy look but are not at all realistic (and people quickly grow tired of it if it's over-used.) There are other methods that result in rather realistic looking results.

So while your camera has a built-in HDR mode, another option is to just let the camera take the HDR sequence, but keep the original frames and then use computer software that allows more control over how the images are combined. There are LOTS of choices out there, but a program called PhotoMatix is probably the most popular. I very seldom use HDR (I have a complete set of those gradient neutral density filters) so I don't have any experience using PhotoMatix.

But HDR probably is the least expensive option because you can do this with any camera and don't need to buy any gear (but a tripod is extremely helpful if you don't happen to already own one.) If you go to a video site (e.g. YouTube) and do a search on HDR, you can find LOTS of tutorials.