single photos machine

light contrast in age old machine

Overexposed and the fence is an irritating distraction. I checked your other pictures as well. Looks like your camera is overexposing all of the time by app. 2 stops. Get another camera or stop shooting directly into bright sky. Keep the light at your back. For exposures like this avoid the cluttered messy background and use a fill flash.

Beautiful handling of high contrast: it works beautifully with your subject!

Sorry, beg to differ greatly. This is a classic example of an autoexposure poorly done. Just because there's a dark shadow doesn't mean great contrast right away, especially when the background is blasted out from overexposure. It often helps on these auto-cameras to take the exposure compensation and lower it a bit, or to go even further take the same shot at a bracket settings. Or, move the camera around using it as a light meter and see what it is reading out. There are some good sites on photo.net itself that explain dynamic range.

I discern that you are much more educated in these matters than am I. Whatever the technical truths may be, or the limitations of the photographer's equipment, or my lack of understanding of either, I find the image still to be pleasing. I would, however, like to read some of the information regarding dynamic range if you'd be kind enough to provide the url.

While this link is more digitally oriented, Bob Atkins has some good explanations of dynamic range here.

http://www.photo.net/learn/drange/

A search done using the photo.net search function turns up several hundred links that discuss this issue. BTW many cameras tend to have good light meters built in, but it helps to check them to see how accurate they really are. In the image above and others posted by this party I see the same "type" of exposure which leads me to believe that in this particular camera, the light meter is off. Another issue is choosing the time of day to take an image. A checking of the shadows in this exposure tells me the image is taken at almost high noon, one of the worst times to expose film or digital because then things are VERY BRIGHT and VERY DARK at the same time. Best time is several hours shy of noon either side. Noontime is best spent with a cold drink planning the images.