canon a95 with dark pictures

[glenn cain]

hey guys i own one and i realise that it generally takes dark pictures. non-lense or any manual adjustments. a friend who owns one agree with me. what can i do to make pictures fit our "gamma range" (exclude picture editting)? its it the camera trait or its typical that we have to make manual adjustments?

thanks dude

[fleek]

hey guys i own one and i realise that it generally takes dark pictures. non-lense or any manual adjustments. a friend who owns one agree with me. what can i do to make pictures fit our "gamma range" (exclude picture editting)? its it the camera trait or its typical that we have to make manual adjustments?

thanks dude

Think you will need to check the camera set-up. P&S cameras normally have different modes, like indoor and outdoor modes. These different modes will affect the exposure of the picture taken.

[AceViperX]

Exposure compensation

Set your exposure compensation to +0.3 or +0.7

[haowee]

make the shutter speed slower then use tripod.

[glenn cain]

I'm refering to "auto" mode as well. I mean, if the auto mode can give fair result then something is wrong with the evalution system of the cam. Or is it?

Like I would point in a slightly darker area with alot of black object and the auto mode would percieve that even a 1 sec shutter speed wasn't enough and display the shuttle speed number in red.

and there are occasions where i can't use tripod, such as taking picture of people in a slightly dim condition, and the result seems dimmer than percieved by the eye. auto mode again.

is it typical of a digicam to behave like that?

[fleek]

I'm refering to "auto" mode as well. I mean, if the auto mode can give fair result then something is wrong with the evalution system of the cam. Or is it?

Like I would point in a slightly darker area with alot of black object and the auto mode would percieve that even a 1 sec shutter speed wasn't enough and display the shuttle speed number in red.

and there are occasions where i can't use tripod, such as taking picture of people in a slightly dim condition, and the result seems dimmer than percieved by the eye. auto mode again.

is it typical of a digicam to behave like that?

Yep, digital cameras normally compensate far more because you can use post processing to "lighten things up" in a slightly dark picture. However, if a picture is over-exposed till clipping occurs, you can never recover the details already. That's why most P&S have built in flash that will fire the instant when they think that there is not enough lighting.

The other thing is also the apperture size of the lense, even if you see F2.8 on the screen, but look at that tiny little hole that light can enter.

[AceViperX]

If you point at something black, the camera will be fooled into thinking there isn't enough light and will try to slow down to shutter speed and/or open up the apeture to compensate. Ironically, the picture will come out overexposed. A shot with alot of black color, you have to set the exposure compensation to -ve.

Likewise, if you shoot at something which is predominantly white, the picture will come out underexposed. Then you need to set exposure compensation to +ve.

A basic camera's light meter works on the principle that the sum of all the color and light in a frame will equal to a grey color. That is why when taking something white, it will come out dark/grey/underexposed and taking something black will cause overexposure.

[glenn cain]

THanks for all the replies.

So what we have here is the fact that its all a matter of hving the "skill" of counter-fooling the cam, choosing the right spot to focus and meter before moving back to desired frame/spot, and editing since this is the nature of the machine?

[nic]

I doesn't seem to have any probs with my A95...

perhaps you were taking photos with a bright back ground?
or my standards of "good photos" is much lower....