Sometimes when I take photos with a Nikon D300 I got some blown out highlights. Does anybody knows a technique that helps to avoid this undesirable effect?
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9Welcome to the community. By "burnt" you mean overly exposed allover? Is it possible that you use spot metering and meter for a very dark area/subject in your scene? Can you post a picture to demonstrate the problem?– ysapJan 13, 2011 at 10:59
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1I've used the d300 for years and not seen 'burnt' photos. But I must echo ysap-- please post an example.– mmrJan 13, 2011 at 18:04
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You mention D300 two time in your question but you tagged your question with nikon-d3000; please clarify.– рüффпJul 12, 2013 at 8:00
2 Answers
To avoid blown highlights you can:
- use your camera's exposure compensation to set -1 or -2 stops of exposure.
- use spot metering on a lighter part of the image and use exposure-lock before re-framing.
- use matrix metering (sometimes helps)
- alter the positioning of subject and/or camera to make better use of available light
- use supplementary lighting to reduce the depth of shadows in the subject
The range of light levels that can be recorded by a camera are much lower than those present in many real-life situations. One way to deal with this is to use High Dynamic Range (HDR) Imaging techniques. Use the exposure bracketing features of the camera to make multiple images that can be combined using HDR software that compresses the dynamic range of the scene (using tone mapping) to fit within the range expressible in a displayed or printed image.
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(creative commons images by Kevin McCoy via Wikipedia)
It depends what do you means by overexposing, according to some condition it is normal the camera to overexpose, in that ponctual condition you just follow RedGrittyBrick's answer.
However it could be the camera which constantly overexpose and in that case you can tune a compensation with the setting b6: Fine Tune Optimal Exposure
in the Custom Settings
menu.
You can even have a setting bank like A
without compensation and the setting bank B
with a different value of the b6
setting.