Remind me...

[louisb]

I never seem to be able to nail the exposure when shooting with the R-D1. 1 in 20 might be spot on.

So remind me, do I expose for the shadows and recover blown highlights (in Lightroom or CS2) or do I expose for the bright areas and then relieve the shadows in post processing?

LouisB

 

[M. Valdemar]

Use it on "automatic" and it will come out fine.

The camera meter slightly underexposes. Only shoot RAW.

Adjust the histogram in Photoshop to bring up the shadows a little bit, and 95% of your photos will be good.

 

[LCT]

...do I expose for the shadows and recover blown highlights (in Lightroom or CS2) or do I expose for the bright areas and then relieve the shadows in post processing?

I expose for the (not too) bright areas as recovering blown highlights is much more difficult, if not impossible.

 

[louisb]

Use it on "automatic" and it will come out fine.

The camera meter slightly underexposes. Only shoot RAW.

Adjust the histogram in Photoshop to bring up the shadows a little bit, and 95% of your photos will be good.

Good point, for the first few months I owned the R-D1 I did mainly shoot on auto. I don't know why but I then got into the habit of doing everything manually.

I do only shoot in RAW but I agree, I should go back to auto for a bit and see if that improves my success rate.

Pardon me for being a dweeb but 'shadows' are the left hand side of the history. correct?

Thanks

LouisB

 

[Burkey]

Being aperture priority I too have had great luck with the auto exposure. RAW is really the best way to go. I occasionally dial in a .5 or so minus EV if I'm shooting in very bright light hopefully to avoid blown out high values that aren't recoverable.
I've recently started using Capture One LE and am really liking what I see from the processed RAW files.
The RD-1 certainly has a signature, one I like more and more as I use it.

 

[JNewell]

Funny, my eperience is the opposite. I've been using AE and having really good results, which was not my initial expectation.

 

[emraphoto]

ae, raw and dial in a bit of compensation as needed.
blown highlights are pretty hard to deal with... i'd keep that in mind.

 

[Matthew Allen]

With any digital, the best approach IMHO is to expose for the highlights but then to push the histogram as far to the right (the highlight side) as you can without losing information you want to keep. This will minimise noise in the final image, as pulling up shadows in PP greatly increases the visibility of noise.

That said, if you have one chance at a shot, it's much safer to expose more conservatively. A slightly noisy image is better than one ruined by badly blown highlights.

Matthew

 

[louisb]

Thanks for the input. I did quite a walk about today photographing various sites in the East End of London. I used AE in most cases and have found the results are fine. I'd forgotten that the shutter was variable so I got a lot of shots are weird speeds, like 1/70th!

LouisB