Hey All,

This is my first time posting in the Camera/Photography section (usually I'm in the 3G TL forum).

I recently picked up a Rebel XTi with the lens kit and I was able to shoot some photos over Christmas. Please keep in mind I'm a total newbie when it comes to photography. I shot many pictures indoors mostly of people. I didn't have a huge amount of light in the rooms I shot the pictures. I kept the camera in Auto mode and after downloading the photos to my PC today, I noticed most of them came out really dark.

I have 2 questions:

1) What can I do to improve the lighting/brightness of the photos I take?
2) Can I do some post-processing on the pics I have to make them brighter? If so, what do you recommend?

Thanks in advance guys!

 

Could you post some samples of the ones that were underexposed?

 

When I got my Digital Rebel, I notice the same thing. The built-in flash sucks, it's works good for about 6 feet. I purchased a better flash, the Canon 420EX.

I really notice this again the other night. I got a 10-22mm lens for Christmas. The pic's I took at night in my family room with just the built -in flash with Auto, no good.

I'm a bit of a newb as well, Dan can give you a better answer. Dan I'll post the one's mentioned to your evaluation.

 

Here's a sample. Any help would be appreciated!

 

It looks underexposed by about a stop, and I think the flash is mostly to blame. It's fairly typical for the cameras to think their internal flashes are more powerful than they really are.

To fix this particular shot, you need to do one or more of the following:
1) increase ambient lighting
2) increase flash power
3) increase exposure time
4) use a larger aperture (lower F-number)
5) use a higher ISO

I know you just got your camera so it will probably take some time getting to know how all the settings affect exposure, but in the mean time, if you're going to use flash, try the "P" exposure mode instead of auto. It controls most of the exposure settings for you, but you can override some of them to give you more control.

Here's how the different exposure modes handle flash photography:
Auto: puts the priority on ambient lighting and will use the flash to illuminate the foreground
P (Program AE): works as fill flash in bright conditions, but switches to using the flash as the primary source of light in dark/indoor conditions
Tv (Shutter Priority) and Av (Aperture Priority): both modes always use the flash as fill light and rely on ambient lighting to do the rest of the illumination
M (Manual): gives you full control of how much the flash will be used to light the scene.

 

Also, the white bags in the foreground and the practical messed with the metering. I think the onboard flash could have given more (if just a little bit) if you had dialed in some exposure compensation.

Your EXIF says the camera used f4 @ ISO 400. I think the TTL artificially limited the flash's output.

 

Sorry. I just read that you're new to photography. Let me explain my post.

Your camera was using its grid pattern evaluative metering mode. The camera divides the scene into sections (the amount of sections differ by model) and then calculates exposure based on some internal algorithm.

In your case, the white bags are good 1/3rd of the image and the practical (any visible artificial light source in a frame is a "practical") created a hotspot up top. So the camera determined that this scene was brighter than it really was.

TTL is Through The Lens. A camera that uses TTL flash metering will fire the flash and then measure the amount of light being reflected back into the camera. It will then shut off the flash when it thinks the image is exposed. A +1 exposure compensation would have made the camera turn up the flash output to expose the image 1 stop brighter than its metering wants.