White Subjects using Digital Cameras

If the aperture number increasing or decreasing?

To reduce exposure, you can reduce the size of the aperture (i.e. change from f5.6 to f32), you can increase the shutter speed, and you can reduce the ISO number.

You'll probably need to be in manual mode to control all three.

You have two problems: contrast and exposure. As you seem to realize, you need to shoot under early am, late pm or cloudy conditions to minimize contrast. For exposure, you need to use one of two tricks. First, you can shoot manually. Note the autoexposure settings in the viewfinder or LCD display. Then switch to manual and reduce the aperture (which will also increase depth of field) or reduce the exposure time (which will freeze motion better). The second approach is to fool the autoexposure. Near the shutter button is an exposure adjustment button (it has a +/- on it). Hold that down and rotate the wheel on the back of the camera until the LCD exposure display reads -1.5 (roughly). Use the histogram to shoot and check. You probably need around 1.5 stops of adjustment to prevent overblown whites.

In fact, you need a spot-metering type when shooting under that condition. Normally, spot-metering allows a very precise light-metering. If my memory serves, 3 % of section in the viewfinder area ( mostly in the center area ) will be used for the light-metering. Then, to shoot the white object, such as snow, focus around the specified area and find the right exposure; I add 2/3 - 1 stop over exposure. But, consult the histogram to make sure that the highlight didn't loose the details. In addition, you may take advantage of AEB ( auto exposure bracket ) since it allows shooting 5-7 frames at the different exposures. Good luck !

If you're not getting good results by setting the exposure compensation to -0.3EV or -0.7 EV, try reducing the contrast when you shoot. The D200 allows you to adjust the contrast (tone) before taking a shot so it's relatively easy to set it down a notch or two. I would also recommend shooting raw files and converting them to 16-bit TIFF files using Adobe Camera Raw, rather than the supplied Picture Project software, which is horrible. TYhe latest version of Camera Raw can open D200 files.

Hi,
Well the problem you are describing is familier.
When shooting in mid-day the light is changing quicklly from one spot in the frame to another and the diffrance between shaded and not shaded is very big.the light meter cannot give a correct call for both situations at the same time so it gives some kind of an averge often reffered to as 18% grey (since the lightmeter is colorblind).
What Im saying is that you can eat the cake and leave it whole (Hope I said that right...).
What you can do is shoot two pictures one with the light meter on spot mode and taking the light measurment from the bird and then it wont be burned but the whole background will be, another one measured by the whole frame then use both pictures to make one.
Hope I helped,
Ron.

Hi:

I also shoot a lot of Egrets with D200 and also D70s. First of all I set my camera to Center Weighted Metering. Sometimes I have to set the Exposure Comp. to - 1.3 or 1.7. This usually gets all the subtle detail in the Egret foliage but leaves the rest of the image background very, very dark. I reclaim the shadow detail with Nikon Capture 4.4 "Advanced RAW" and the D-Lighting Tool. Or, you could use Spot Metering and meter off the brightest part of the bird, but that can be trickier to do.

You can check out some of my bird shots at www.veganphoto.com and www.pbase.com/veganphoto. Happy shooting!

Frankphoto

Since your camera has the capability of shooting at a set exposure AND recording at multiple exposure compensations, set it up to record a second and third (maybe even a fourth) exposure at -1.5,-2.0and -2.5 (if possible). The beauty of digital is that you only have to trip the shutter once and the camera will record in multiple exposures.

Look at the images on your computer and choose which one of the underexposed images has the best retained detail of the white feathers. IGNORE the rest of the picture and play with the Tone and Contrast to add more "snap" to the white.

Take the "properly" exposed image (with the blown out whites) and place the one with the adjusted / corrected feathers on top and use your graphics program to:

either

A) make the feather corrected image transparent (increase to desired level) so the "new" feathers show up on top of the blown out ones or...

B) mask the corrected feathers and copy / paste them on top of the blown out ones

Ted