Megan by the window

[Joan Breckwoldt]

Dear Sharon,

Thank you so much for such a thoughtful response to my photos. I don't have any kind of metering device. After I took these photos I remembered reading somewhere that the model shouldn't be wearing a white shirt.

I can take (whatever it is in my digital camera, don't know the right word) to the printmaker and can't she lighten these up? Since I can paint the colors from life could she lighten them and then I could use the photos more for the form? Hmm, maybe that won't work. I read on the forum where one artist takes his photos in B&W and then paints the color from life.

Originally Posted by Sharon Knettell

Make sure there are no trees at least 35' (50' is ideal) from where you are working. They can cast a dreadful Kermit like glow to skin and fabric.

Are you seeing green on her face? The ones taken by the garage have some trees up high over the edge of the driveway. Could this be causing the green?

Though I did take the first batch of photos late in the afternoon, the five posted above were taken between 11:00 -11:30 a.m. on a sunny day. I just don't know why my photos are consistently too dark. I just reviewed the photos from yesterday and they are all as dark as the ones I posted above or darker. I will buy that metering device you talked about above and that should at least tell me what I'm looking at as far as darkness/lightness. I also need to retake these with my daughter closer to the light.

Would you recommend against me trying to paint from these photos? I got some good poses but I guess I can do that again if I did it once.

Thank you again,

Joan

[Sharon Knettell]

Joan,

It is very difficult to lighten up a face on a standard print as it loses color saturation, with digital it is well nigh impossible.

You probably have an automatic metering system on your camera and you obviously are using that. The automatic meters for both the dark areas and the light and reaches a mean. To hold the light area you are losing the medium tones. You have to learn to overide the automatic system and learn to work more in manual mode. You have to meter on the face and bracket ( different exposures) to capture the white. At this point don't be too anxious to make a picture, master your photo skills first. There are a lot of good books out there that would help.

Take these photos as a learning experience, I would find them too dark to paint with. Give yourself the best possible material you can, especially at the beginning.

[Joan Breckwoldt]

Dear Sharon,

Thank you for your honest advice, I will certainly take it. Learning how to take good reference photos will be my first priority when we get back from our vacation. I live within 1/2 a mile of two good camera shops, they should be able to explain things to me. And there's probably a lot of info on the internet, and . . . oh yes, the manual that came with my digital camera!

Joan

[Mike McCarty]

Joan,

If your camera does not have a spot metering system (check the manual, easy feature to use) try this:

Frame your daughter as you did before, half figure including the white shirt. Within the viewfinder, notice that the metering system has chosen the optimum combination of aperture and shutter speed for this scene. It might read something like 60 at 5.6. Next, zoom into your daughters face, eliminating the white shirt. Notice that the two numbers have changed. Make note of this new exposure combination. At this point you have effectively "spot metered" her face and the camera has given no consideration, except for reflected light, to the white shirt.

At this point you can do one of two things, first you could, while zoomed in on the face, press the shutter release button half way down and lock in this exposure. With your finger still halfway depressing the shutter release (if you release it will loose the exposure you want) recompose the scene to include the shirt and shoot the picture. This takes a little agility but with a little practice you'll get the hang of it.

Your second choice would be to place your camera in full manual mode and select the shutter speed and aperture setting indicated above when you exposed for the face only, then take the picture.

I agree with the above comments about your daughter needing more light on her face. This should make that happen.

[Joan Breckwoldt]

Dear Mike,

Thank you so much for your post and the helpful information. I have pushed down the shutter release button half-way to 'hold' settings on my still camera but wasn't aware that I could do the same thing on my digital camera. And it's been so long I don't even remember what settings I was trying to 'hold' or capture with the still camera. I will have to see if I can get that to work.

I probably need to get some kind of metering device, if nothing else it would help me understand why when I look through the lens and see light, but then when I load the digital photos on the computer, they're dark. Well, it might not help me to understand it, but at least I won't be surprised by my dark images.

Mike, thank you again for helping me out with this. You have such a vast amount of knowledge when it comes to photography (obvious in your reference photos and all the help you give on this forum) that you have saved me untold amounts of time.

We're leaving town tomorrow but the first thing I will do when we get back is try out your suggestions. I'm glad I saw your post before I left and was able to answer so you wouldn't think your help went unappreciated.

Joan

[Mike McCarty]

I probably need to get some kind of metering device

Joan,

Every modern camera has a "metering device" built in. This is how it determines proper exposure for any given light situation. Exposure being the combination of two factors a) how wide the aperture is opened (aka f stop, this can range from 2.8 to 22 and many points in between) and b) how long the aperture is left open (aka shutter speed, ranging from full seconds to many thousandths of a second). Or in other words, how much light, and for how long. These two things combine to determine the amount of light which hits either the film, or in the case of digital, the chip. In very low light situations the aperture would want to open wide for a long time.

It makes this determination based on what it sees through the viewfinder, not necessarily what is in front of the camera.

Some cameras allow the viewfinder to be further separated into smaller "zones" such as, the middle 1/3, or in the case of spot metering, the center 5+-% of the viewfinder. When one of these zones is selected, only the lighting conditions within this zone is used to determine the exposure of the scene. There may be other calculus going on depending on the sophistication of the camera.

So if you can, through any of these methods described in this or the above post, explain to your camera that you would like to expose only for the area of the face, then you will get a proper exposure for that section of the viewfinder. Understanding that other areas of the picture may be either over or under exposed, but for your purposes, you don't really care.

In the following example the girl was standing in front of pure sunlight. If the camera were allowed to consider the entire frame it would have tried to balance all that light coming in and the result would have been a completely washed out face. Instead, I asked the camera to only consider the light on her face for exposure. This gave a pleasing facial exposure and completely over exposed the background, which was fine with me.

[Sharon Knettell]

Mike,

Thanks for jumping in with some great advice. I have a beautiful reliable FE2 Nikon which I only use on manual mode. It does not have too many bells and whistles anyway. It does have through the lens metering and I always meter for the face and bracket like ****, for the rest. My printmaker burns in the lights, if need be. I am so used to shooting in available light manually, it is hard to relay that information to someone starting out with different equipment.

As I understand nowadays that kind of printing adjustment is no longer an available option for digital. The exposure has to be right on the money. Any lights or whites, if they are washed out cannot be retrieved.

Thanks again,