Underexposed backgrounds

[bingo]

Sometimes I get underexposed backgrounds even when the subject is well exposed. This seems to happen at night'ish photography. I dont use flash on well lit objects (i.e an important site). I tried leaving the shutter open for longer but that didnt seem to help. What is the solution. Diffrent lense with wider aperture, flash or what??

Thanks alot.

[wulf]

It depends on what is in the frame. Sometimes it is impossible to get the whole picture properly exposed because the range of light levels is too great.

Possible solutions include:

- reframing the picture so that the contrast range is reduced
- high dynamic range (HDR) post-processing, blending differently exposed versions of the same subject to compensate
- welcoming that limitation as part of the image and playing with the options (eg. keeping the shutter open longer to expose for the background knowing that the main subject will become overexposed)

Wulf

[spazoid1965]

It would be easier for someone to answer this queation if you posted a few photos. That way people can see how the photos were lit.

[yurik]

For me, if hardware doesn't solve my problem, I turn to software.

I, too, would recommend HDR, although it sometimes creates results that look unnatural

Another solution would be basic photo editing: selectively lightening the background through a photo editing program.

[bingo]

Thank you all for your help.

[wulf]

I, too, would recommend HDR, although it sometimes creates results that look unnatural
It is possible to be quite subtle while adapting the concept of mixing photos at different exposures. For example, in this shot I've applied various enhancements including putting a lot more detail in the part of the trunk on the right from an overexposed version of the shot (click on it for a clearer, larger view):

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/wulf/432630048/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/182/432630048_19de056c44_m.jpg" width="240" height="240" alt="Cleft Tree" /></a>

I was planning to do more with this but, since I wasn't using a tripod, the rest didn't line up so well! Blending a couple of pictures together (and there are probably much better examples if I spent some time looking) makes the end result more like what you think you eyes see (flicking from dark to light areas and making on the fly adjustments) rather than what your camera sees (taking a single frame which is underexposed for some parts and overexposed for others).

Wulf

[ikiteboarding]

Normally the reason for this is if you are shooting in little to no light. The foreground would be well lit because you are using flash, but there won't be any detail in the background.

If you do have some available light try shooting in Aperture Priority and use a fast aperture like f4.5 or more.