Untitled

Ok I am having trouble here. This shot is with Kodak Portra 160VC 70-

200 2.8 sigma HSM APO EX, Canon Elan 2e. I shot 3 rolls and many

turned out like this. I have shot the same film when the subject was

wearing darker colors and the day was not as sunny and the Photos

were crips and clean. What is going on here?? Could my camera be

metering off of the dress and underexposing the whole photo?? It

seems the Lab tried to compensate for the dark negatives by

brightening the picture up A LOT! How do I compose a shot when I

cannot trust my camera's meter? I am going to take photos at her

wedding and I was shooting some practice rolls here (Thank goodness

I thoght enought to do this). Am I right on this. Please don't hold

back let me know what you think and what I am doing wrong.

For this particular shot, my guess is that the camera exposed for the highlights as they take up most of the frame along with the white dress. This will lead to underexposure of your main subject in this instance. There are several things you can try. The most effective method is to purchase an incident meter and meter from the subject. You could "zoom" in on the bride's face, this would give you an accurate reflective meter reading, and set your exposure accrodingly. You could also guess. Look at the overall scene, make note that the bride is in the shadows, and increase exposure accordingly. Good Luck!

 

Brandon

I am quite sure that the camera meter was fooled into under exposure. You could buy a grey card and meter off that or use a hand held meter to measure the light falling on the subject (incident meter one with the little white dome).

Although the incident light meter approach will be the most accurate, the 18% grey card has the benefit of being cheap. An even cheaper method is to meter your hand at arms length (in the same light) and add one stop. It's not especially scientific, but works pretty well.

Am I having this problem because of a combination of bright light, light color dress and inability of my camera to reason?? I guess another way to ask the same question is, Would I have had this problem indoors, or a dimmer environment?

The same problem will occur indoors, if you are metering a scene which is predominantly white, rather than 18% grey. The idea is to overcome the camera's inability to reason by using your own innate ability to do so. If you meter off a grey card, use the meter reading, if you meter off the white dress, open up by 2 stops. Good job you practised before the wedding :)