Making Your Life Easier • October 2009 Newsletter

Facing Your Darkroom Fears

It happens to everybody once in awhile. You have your camera, you have the flash on, you’re ready to take the picture… Click! But when you look at the results they are as dark as a cave. What happened?

Normally, if the room has bright windows and you have an automatic digital camera, the camera will try to compensate for the light coming from the outside by darkening the rest of the photo.

How do I fix it?

Simple. Try pointing the camera away from the window and taking a different photo. If the photo looks fine then you can use the half-waydown button technique. Here’s how it works. 90% of digital cameras allow you to push the shutter button on the camera half-way down without shooting. By pressing the button only half-way down, the camera holds the exposure of the side of the room you’re looking at and autofocuses. The trick is to pick an object of equal distance, hold the button half-way down, bring the camera back to the window area and finish the click. By doing this, you’ve basically “fooled” the camera into thinking it was still looking at a different part of the room and using that exposure.

This trick will also work on front views of the house that come out too dark because the sun is behind the home. Simply point the camera at the front steps of the house, or the grass. Then push the shutter button half-way down and bring the camera back up to frame the front view again. Click!

Final Note

When using this technique inside a house, the windows will have a tendency to look brighter than normal or even blown-out, so you need to decide what’s more important. Showing the inside of the room in detail, or showing the outside of the window.

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