Question by Zoe Lynne: How do I adjust my camera settings to take pictures of bright white sand?
I have a pretty basic digital camera (Kodak EasyShare). I am trying to take pictures of White Sands National Monument. I took a bunch of pictures the other day, but the sand looks brown or gray, not white.
How do I adjust my camera settings to make the sand look white?
Best answer:
Answer by AWBoater
That is a classic problem that affects all cameras, including $ 6,000 professional cameras. The problem is that the exposure mechanism becomes fooled if the scene is all light or white, as well as all black. If you took two photos – one of a white wall and one of a black wall, they would both turn out medium gray.
The normal way to fix this is to use exposure compensation, and over-expose the photo by +1EV to +2EV.
But many compact cameras do not have this function, so look for a scene mode called “beach”, “snow”, etc.
If your camera has neither, try this trick.
Aim your camera at a scene with both light and dark objects in them – at about the same distance as the photo you want to take.
Then depress your shutter half-way down. This will cause the metering system in your camera to calculate the exposure for the scene you are aiming at. If there are enough light/dark areas in the scene, the exposure will be correct. But since the focus is also calculated, the objects must be at the same distance as what you want to photograph.
Then keeping the shutter half-way down, re-aim your camera to your intended object, and without letting your finger off the shutter, depress it fully to take the photo.
The photo should be taken with the exposure information that it calculated when you were pointing to the other scene. So in a sense, you are using the scene with light and dark objects to set the exposure for the beach scene.
Sometimes, pros use a gray card (a medium gray or 18% gray card). They put the card in front of the camera to get the proper exposure, then take the photo. But you cannot do this as your camera will focus on the card, and then when you remove the board, the camera won’t be able to refocus. If you let your finger off the shutter to allow your camera to refocus, it will also recalculate the exposure.
http://www.althephoto.com
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