See Saw

[nicko97]

We are starting to get some warm weather in the Boston area so I took my niece and daughter to the playground on Saturday. This a picture of my niece on the see saw and was wondering what people thought of it. This was my first time using the camera outside.

I would like to know if the composition is good and I think it might be over exposed. I started to noticed some of the pictures were coming out a little dark so set exposure compensation to +1. Not sure why the pictures were looking a little dark when it was a nice sunny day maybe the shutter was to fast.

Nikon D5000
lens 55-200
aperture priority
aperture f 7.1
shutter 1/800
exposure bias +1
focal length 150 mm
ISO 200



If anyone is interested the full set is here. I took almost 300 pictures but only a small percentage came out OK and those are on Filckr

Play Ground - a set on Flickr

Thanks,

Mark

[Surprised]

I'm a rank amateur at this game but I liked this pic -- the focus on the subject seems good and she stands out well from the background. However the light doesn't seem to have done you any favours (or should I say 'favors'?!) -- there are some harsh shadowson the right-hand side of her face and as a result it's quite hard to see her right eye. From reading other posts in this forum I'm sure things like fill-flash etc would get round that (not that I've ever used it myself, or even have the equipment), but how on earth you'd do that when your subject is on a see-saw is beyond me I'm afraid! But hey, the pic's a good one, so I'll shut up!

Surprised.

[morsm]

Nice portrait! I especially like the composition and framing.

The picture may be a little overexposed, but it suits the colors. You're now capturing that rather harsh late winter / early spring sunlight very well.

As a possible explanation of why the pictures came out too dark, I think two things could be the matter. I don't have any experience whatsoever with Nikon, but I ran into these with my first Canon when I was getting used to it.
The first thing is quite silly: in bright light, you can't see the LCD very well. If you've ever thought about working in the garden with your laptop on a nice day, you'll know what I mean. You may wrongly conclude that the pictures are underexposed from looking at them, so actually overcorrecting. You can cure this by looking not only at the picture, but also at the histogram. If that looks healthy (i.e. even distribution of brightness), then ignore the brightness of the picture and keep shooting until you get back inside!

The second possibility is average metering when you get direct sunlight into the lens, or some other bright object such as light-colored tiles that reflect the light. The camera will tend to minimize the highlight by bringing the exposure down. You can use spot metering (point the active AF point or center of the viewfinder at the part of the frame you'd like to have well exposed) to cure this.
Looking at the parameters you took this picture with : 1/800 at f 1/7.1 and ISO 200, there was a lot of light out there that day!

[nicko97]

Thank you, I thought the composition came out well too. Since I'm really just starting to learn about photography I've been focusing on trying to improve my composition by filling the frame or trying to follow the rule of thirds.

I actually looked at the histogram, not that I fully understand it yet. What I noticed was the mountain was on the left side and the shutter speeds were over a 1000 on some of the images. After increasing the exposure compensation to +1 I checked the histogram and it looked a lot more even and the shutter speed dropped a lot, so I was thinking that the shutter speed might have been too fast.

The following is a example of an image I think came out a little dark .

Shutter 1/640
Aperture f/7.1
Exposure Bias 0
Focal Length 175 mm
Metering is the default matrix
ISO 200



This one was taken after I increased exposure compensation and the shutter speed was halved.

Shutter 1/320
Aperture f/7.1
Exposure Bias 1.00
Focal Length 200 mm
Metering Matrix
ISO 200



The images were taken around 3pm EST.

I've read that using flash outdoors while its sunny can help. I don't think flash would have helped in this instance due to the distance, I only have the built-in flash.

I think that using spot metering is a good suggestion, I'll have to give that a try next time.

Thank you for taking the time to replay to my post.

Mark