DSLR exposure issues

[Ian]

Mike's post about his Canon EOS-20D uner-exposing got me thinking and I was chatting just now to another photographer who is still shooting film as well as digital. He finds that when shooting colour negative film the exposure latitude is very wide, as long as you don't under expose too much. Nothing surprising there - colour neg does have a very wide exposure latitude.

He tends to shoot weddings and he's tried both a Fujifilm FinePix S2 Pro and an S3 Pro and finds that both can unexpectedly underexpose, more so than when he's using his Nikon F5 with colour neg.

It's established wisdom to think of digital as being like colour reversal or positive slide film - highlights being vulnerable to over exposure but a lot can be dug out of the shadows.

I think some digital cameras will err on the side of caution and under expose significantly in order to preserve highlights, perhaps more so than exposure systems in film cameras. This does mean more work in post processing, which my friend is clearly not used to.

Another issue he has experienced with digital is dynamic range compression on overcast days, which you'd kind of expect not to be the case...

Anyone like to comment?

Ian

[spl]

Re: DSLR exposure issues

Mike's post about his Canon EOS-20D uner-exposing
Another issue he has experienced with digital is dynamic range compression on overcast days, which you'd kind of expect not to be the case...

Anyone like to comment?

Ian

I agree with the first bit about the versatility that digital gives you in editing shadows and bringing out detail there which just happens to suit my style and explains why I like my digital results far better than my film results. I think this was because of being in Africa I tended to underexpose even with film becuase the light is so harsh there - I also used a UV filter but the results were never great. On one occasion I made the mistake of mismatching the ISO (then called ASA) of the film with the setting on the camera and did get some interesting results so maybe I would have been more successful there if I had followed up that as a strategy but I never did and now becuase of digital don't have to.

Please can you give more explanation about what you meant by your last paragraph - dont' understand it
sue

[yoshi]

Re: DSLR exposure issues

Hi Ian, nothing to add but just let me put it differently.
When AE programs were written a few decades ago, manufacturers assumed that for compact film cameras and for entry SLR's most people use negative films, while for mid- to highend SLR's they assumed positive films which have narrower latitudes. So underexposure tendency for the latter type cameras. Maybe this tradition still holds for dSLR's.

Apart from exposure, for 20D, when you use JPEG, you can make some adjustments on parameters. In my case, I add sharpness by one scale and keep all others as default and register this as parameter 1 to reduce the need of post processing.
For 30D, I understand, you have more room of fine tuning on JPEG files.

yoshi

[bigbob]

Re: DSLR exposure issues

Both the S2 and S3 underexpose by about half a stop , the reason i think is because both cameras were aimed at pro wedding photographers.
Now you can always retrieve underexposure but once you overexpose there is no information recorded in the blown out part so no matter how good you are in Photoshop once it's gone , it's gone .
Comparing digital to negative film does'nt quiet work , negative film always had more exposure latitude at ASA 100-200 , you could set the exposure comp to a stop either way and you'd still get a reasonable shot , but try that with slide film .
No i'd compare digital to slide film at lower ISO 's at least .

B..