A helping hand in tricky shooting conditions
There are some common situations where it’s hard to get well-exposed pictures with your digital camera.
Bright sunlight behind your subject, known as ‘backlighting’, can fool your camera’s metering system. This leads to dark, underexposed subjects in the foreground. It’s particularly frustrating with portraits where faces closer to the camera are darkened.
Your camera can also struggle in twilight. If the subject is far away, built-in flash won’t have enough power to illuminate the scene brightly.
In addition, slow shutter speeds can lead to blurred results if you’re shooting at twilight without flash.
Twilight portraits can be problematic, too. If you’re using flash, exposure settings will prioritise on the face of a person in the foreground, at the expense of background detail that’s lost darkness.
Using a tripod in twilight can also produce disappointing results. At very low light levels the camera will select its highest sensitivity setting, but this leads to higher levels of picture noise and an unnaturally ‘grainy’ look.
