What did I do wrong?

[dinnes]

Hello folks,

Was at the zoo the other day and was snapping pics mostly just for fun and some practice. Took a photo of an ape and was hoping someone might tell me what I did wrong. It's the only photo in my gallary right now. As you can see the background is pretty washed out by the sun but the ape itself is pretty sharp and clear. What could I have done to get a nice clear background/grass with?

Thanks for any input and your time
David

[dallasm]

I just looked at your photo and the first thing I see right off from the camera info is that your ISO is set pretty high at 400, try setting it down to 100. your shutter speed is a little slow also.
What mode setting are you using on your camera. Try using the Aperture-priority mode in setting your Fstop, and the camera selects a shutter speed for normal exposure.
Good Luck

[jerryph]

You have to understand something... dSLRs are not answers to situations like this. If your background would have been properly exposed, your ape would be underexposed.

You have to know what to expect and what you want in focus and no camera can give you different levels of exposure in different parts of the same picture. This doesn't exist.

What you could do is compromise by used an evaluative or dynamic exposure setting. This means that your background would be a little less over exposed and your ape a little closer to underexposed.

If this was me, I would do the opposite... decide what the main or key subject of my picture was (the ape?), and use SPOT METERING to really get the ape perfectly metered and not care about how off the background or foreground was... as long as the subject was JUST like I wanted it to be exposed.

[dinnes]

Thank you both for your time and efforts I do appreciate it and have a better understanding of what I did now and what I can and can't do.

[coffee]

HI Dinnes, I gave your shot a look also. I also reviewed the EXIF data. First of all you must have a very steady hand to be able to get the ape as clear as you did. At a focal length of 300mm and a 1/40th shutter, most would introduce so much camera shake that this shot would be unusable. But the ape in your shots looks fairly clear.

Considering your focal length, and how sunny it is, I would have chosen an aperture of 5.6 instead of f/11. That way you could have gotten a shutter speed closer your focal length which is more what you want in order to get sharpness on your focus. This wouldn't have helped at all with the exposer, but would have helped get better focus by freezing the subject more.

Looks like you used spot metering, which was right considering the backlighting. If you were close enough to your subject that flash could reach them, you could have intentionally underexposed the shot for the background, and used flash to fill in and correctly get the subject.

One more thing I noticed: Under color space in the data it says "Other". Most use sRGB, few use Adobe RGB, but I've never seen anyone use "Other". Maybe check this to make sure this is actually the setting you want to use so your colors look right.

[dinnes]

Hi Joseph thanks for taking the time to review my picture and your efforts to help me.

I think maybe the reason the photo made it without blur is the "Super Steady Shot" function built into the camera must have worked because believe me my hand is far from steady.

I will definitely take your recommendations and put them into practice. As far as the color space??? I have no idea where that is set in the camera menus and trust me I looked for it. I know when I process in RAW format the color space comes out sRGB.

Thanks again everyone.