My first photo posting

[cichlid]

Hello All,

So I'm outside on a great sunny day. I've set my Nikon D40 to Fine weather, Aperture-priority. ISO 200, F5.6 and 1/1250sec. I had my 55-300mm lens attached. Personally, I like the photo of my wife. The sun was behind me, therefore, she squinted. I believe the right side may be slightly overexposed.



As we were walking. I wanted to experiment with shutter-priority mode. I wanted to capture my daughter walking with a slight blur. Though, each time I tried my photo was way over exposed. Was it a question of shutter speed still too slow, wrong ISO?

Looking forward to your feedback.

Erik

[MiniChris]

If you can afford the depth of field, then by all means raise the shutter speed...it really won't hurt and most certainly will help. If the depth of field becomes an issue, then work with the ISO to adjust for that. I rarely shoot anything moving at low shutter speeds unless it is in a panning situation, then 1/100 works just fine.

[Geoff F]

I think that photo just about works. Maybe a couple of bright areas but nothing too excessive. And I would prefer the squint to an expressionless face.

Many 'real life' photos with tricky light need a bit of Exposure Compensation to allow for the exposure meter becoming confused.

If your photos are coming out over exposed; the answer is simple, you are setting an incorrect exposure.

But working out why it is going wrong may be a bit more difficult. What exposure mode, and did you change anything during the composition; like focus and recompose?

I don't know about that camera but if I am using spot metering and I recompose the shot, the exposure changes to a new value; evaluative metering holds the original exposure. An alternative when using spot metering is to set the Exposure Lock after focusing. But that isn't always convenient for fast action photos.

That may not be your problem, but somehow you must be getting the wrong exposure reading.