Camera help plz

[angemon89]

I am no camera expert so please be gentle if this is a dumb question.

I have a Canon SD1100 IS camera. Sometimes I want to take pictures in low light settings without the flash, but the pictures come out too dark.

For example, sometimes I want to take a picture indoors (in the day time) without flash. So the rooms is filled with medium day light. When I look at the LCD of the camera the room looks pretty bright, but when I go to take the picture it comes out darker than what I just saw in the LCD before I took it.

Is there any way to capture the picture without it automatically turning darker when the camera focuses? I want that natural daylight without the picture being dark.

 

[iBookG4user]

What you're going to want to do is look up in your manual how to set up "Exposure compensation", you're probably going to want to set it to +1 or +2 depending on how under exposed the pictures are. But another problem that you're most likely going to run into is that there is not enough light for the camera to get a picture without it being blurry (ie the shutter speed not being fast enough).

 

[angemon89]

Awesome, I just took some test pictures with the exposure at 0, then at +1. It came out much nicer at +1. Thank you sir.

 

[ChrisA]

I think maybe the camera's automatic exposure system is choosing to under ex[pose the image rather than use a slow shutter sedd and risk blurring the image.

You will either have to use exposure compensation (posably moving from "A" to "P" exposure mode.) or manual exposure mode. Either way if a low shutter speed is required you would need a camera suport of some kind (like a tripod, setting the camera on a table,...) and for the subject to be not moving.

The other option is to use flash. The on-camera flash look bad but you can use bounce flash off a back wall. You need an extenal flash and an optical slave trigger

Last idea: Have you tried correcting the dark images with some kind of an image editor like photoshop or iPhoto? If it is only a stop or so dark it can be corrected.

 

[SLC Flyfishing]

Another possibility could be that you have your camera metering off a bright spot in the room, so the camera thinks it needs a fast shutterspeed to get the optimal exposure, when really the room is darker everywhere else so the end photo is underexposed.

I don't know enough about the metering in your camera, but you should be able to set it up to take an evaluative metering of the entire frame, a center weighted meter, or a spot meter. If it's set to spot meter and you point the center of the frame against a bright spot, the meter only reads from there, one way to get around this is to meter from a darker space then re-compose the image while holding the shutter button half pressed to preserve the meter settings.

In the images you attached, if the camera was set to center or spot metering, it almost certainly would have taken a reading from off your computer's screen where it's bright. If you had it set to evaluative metering it still would have been heavily influenced by the screen, but at least would have taken some of the rest of the room into consideration. If you spot metered off the wall where it's darker you'd get an image closer to the second attached photo, the screen is overexposed, the room looks properly exposed.

There's a lot to learn about photography eh?

SLC

 

[angemon89]

Thanks for the tips. I've been messing with the settings and actually READ the manual. I'm taking much better pictures now that I don't just leave it on auto all the time.

 

[electroshock]

Awesome, I just took some test pictures with the exposure at 0, then at +1. It came out much nicer at +1. Thank you sir.

Well, what's happening here is that the camera doesn't personally know what your preferences are. It's assuming you're the average person who wants a certain look. So when it sized up the photographic situation for the scene (before you took the shot), it was thinking... "Hmmmm..... maybe the photographer wants to preserve details like the text on that monitor..." so it decides to do whatever it takes to save that info -- and results in underexposing a bit. Result: text is readable and looks good, but that's done at the expense of darker areas like the nearby speakers.

Now, if you didn't care much about whatever was on the screen, you could tell the camera: "Hey, I don't care about THAT stuff -- just make sure the speakers and other dark objects are brighter, k?" You can do that in a few indirect ways but for a P&S camera (like yours), the easiest is probably to adjust the exposure compensation setting.

That's basically what you did when you used EC +1... you told the camera that it was OK to let some details "blow out" (be lost) as long as the scene generally looked brighter. Positive EC = brighten up, negative EC = darken.