Is there a WYSIWYG setting?

BruceBurbank

Trying to get some photographs of empty business parking garages, the underground concrete kind, at night. They're almost always very dark, with small areas of minimal light.

I've tried a bunch of different settings, but I can't figure out a way to keep the camera from pumping in a bunch of light into the scene. It's dark down there, and all I want is the photo to look exactly how it looks naturally.

Anybody have any tips as to how I can achieve this?

bruto

Underexpose. Whatever the camera's meter sees, it presumes it ought to average out as 18 percent gray, which is too light. Exposure compensation in the minus direction should do it.

Another thing to try if there are spots of light is to switch to spot metering and meter only the spot of light. The meter ignores everything else.

Not entirely sure how Canon does this, but Nikon's meter spot is the same as the focus spot, so if you recompose after focusing, you must hold that meter reading.

Also not sure about Canon here, but with a Nikon, if you shoot in Raw mode, the post processing program allows you to do two stops exposure compensation plus or minus.

e.t.a. It also occurs to me that Canon probably has a dynamic range extender similar to Nikon's "active D-lighting", and this should probably be turned off to keep the deep shadows black.

PBked

Hi,
I agree with @Bruto about exposure compensation. I would also recommend that you fix your ISO at a low amount although this will slow down your shutter speed - if you have a tripod, no problem. Canon's version of Nikon's "active D-lighting" is "auto lighting optimiser" and this you should disable. I never have it enabled anyway because I find it more of a gimmick than a help. Better results can be had when post processing.
Regards,
PBked

BruceBurbank

Hey, thanks for the tips.

I did some tests. No tripod, so I just did them handheld, so they're not gonna be super sharp, but they're just light tests anyway.

Here's the original shot, where I left the camera on auto exposure, so it's way too bright.

If you feel up to it, download any of those, pull up the EXIF stats and let me know if anything is totally out of whack, or if I should adjust anything further.

BruceBurbank

OK that previous one is the original.

Here's one step down-



Here's two steps down-



Three steps down-