Photography Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for professional, enthusiast and amateur photographers. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I recently returned from a trip to New Mexico taking pictures in the mountains, etc. I was taking pictures both with my Nikon D3300 18-300 1.35-6.3g with a UV filter and my iPhone X. My D3300 consistently appears to overexpose these type of pictures.
I've attached two pictures. Any suggestions will be much appreciated!
D3300+18-300 @18mm, iso 110, f/20, 1/30s [landscape scene mode]:
iPhone X: iso 25, f/1.8, 1/600s:
I think what you're really seeing is the difference between 'photography' and 'computational photography'.
Nothing I can see in the first photo hits 0,0,0 or 255,255,255, it all fits quite neatly between the extremes without ever hitting them. I'd call that a pretty good exposure guess by the camera. The camera doesn't know what you're taking a photo of, or which parts you might like to emphasise. It captures light, the rest is up to you.
The second photo, on the other hand, has been post-processed by the phone to be far more pleasing to the eye. It does actually hit 0,0,0 in places & there's the occasional 255 in the blues, in the sky. It could only do that in post; nothing could be that accurate on the fly.
The phone, algorithmically kind of does know what you're taking a photograph of. It's been programmed to recognise many aspects of many scenes & what to do to make them look 'nice'.
In short, the 'photograph' has left enough room to do your own post-processing. The 'computational photograph' has done it all for you… whether you like the results or not. The developers have worked on these algorithms a long time, to try to ensure that most of the time people do actually like it. tbh, I still think it's a bit 'thin' & unenthusiastic.
By extreme contrast, here's a quick go at brutally shoving the first image in the direction of "Hey, isn't this what we expect a sunny day to look like?!" in a sort of over-enthusiastic picture postcard kind of way, without actually trying at all to copy what the phone did. Consider it merely a third way of looking at it.
I will only focus on some practical tips.
If you constantly feel your images are overexposed, then make constant adjustments so they are as you like.
Use exposure compensation (Page 73 on the user manual)and lower your exposure. Try a decrease of 1/3 steps and compare results.
Or shoot in raw and prepare some predefined settings for developing the images.
