Getting the correct exposure

DadaKopf

Alright, so I got a Lomo recently, got the prints back and I was really happy with them. The colours were exactly the way I wanted them - the exposure was obviously spot on (to my taste) and when I scanned them in, the needed absolutely no alteration whatsoever (take a look here).

Now, I've never been able to achieve the same quality or feel (saturation-wise) with my Canon EOS 1000Fn. It's not that it can't achieve them, it's just that the light metering isn't cutting it for what I want. Most of the time, I'm very careful about where I get the readings from.

What I get either time, anyway, are bland images so I've started experimenting properly with the exposure settings. Occasionally, I'll bracket a few photos but I rarely get the desired effect. Most of the time, an image ends up just underexposed or overexposed so that all the richness of colour and subtle detail is lost. In an attempt to make the colours richer, I opened the aperture by one stop beyond the camera's suggested settings.

Here's what I mean: www.iol.ie/~merz/stuff.
To begin with, the sky was more brilliant and colourful; the apartment block was more brightly lit and was patterned strongly with shadows (the contrast between the two was high).

In the first image, it's obvious what I got wrong. I metered the sky, not the building. However, had I metered the building, the sky wouldn't have come out. I should have balanced the two, but how is this done? One person suggested metering the sky, then metering the building and setting the camera to the average of the two.

In the second image, the building is metered 'correctly' but the sky is washed out (the blue was actually so strong it was framing the upper section of the photo).

In the third one, the sky was much more detailed and colourful while the sand coloured building at the bottom right was strongly reflecting the sun back towards the buildings. The exposure is all wrong, so how should I have gone about this?

The last one is a photograph of London. I'm happy with it (surprised to be honest) although it is slightly overexposed as at that time, it was actually much darker.

Basically, my question is this: when trying to get more colour caturation and the correct exposure, is it best to open up the aperture more or is it best to slow down the shutter speed? In my experience (eg. here), shutter speed is best. Or maybe both?

Also, has anyone a foolproof bracketing technique?

Samson

Essentially the problem is that there is usually too much of a differential in correct exposure between the (bright) sky and the (dark, in shadow) foreground.
Film only has so much exposure range and anything outside of that exposure range will appear as too bright or too dark.
So, for example if we were to (spot) meter for the sky and our correct exposure was f16, 1/500 and then meter for a building facade in shadow which gave us f8, 1/60 that would give a differential of 5 stops, which is outside of the usual 2 to 3 stop range of most print film.
The above is an example of meter readings I have just taken (from my front door) using a Canon SLR (spot-metering selected) and using 400ISO film.

You have three choices to overcome this problem:

Option 1. use a graduated neutral density (ND grad) filter to darken the sky down by 1, 2 or 3 stops, thus bringing it closer (in exposure terms) to the foreground; you will then have good detail in the sky and in the foreground.
This method is used by a lot of landscape photographers using slide film.

Here is an example (from luminous-landscape.com) of what I am talking about:


In this shot the meter reading was taken from the sky, which has good detail, but, the mountain range is far too dark (under-exposed or in silhouette).


In this one there is good detail in the mountain range as it was metered, but now the sky is completely over-exposed.


In this shot the sky and foreground both have detail through the use of an ND grad filter.

ND grad filters look like this:


Option 2. scan your photos and use Photoshop to mess around with the exposure of certain areas use the mask function.

Option 3. meter the sky, meter the foreground and then set your camera to an average of the two readings.
Your shot will be incorrectly exposed for both, but you can get around this in the printing stage by giving more/less exposure to whatever areas of the print require it.
This option is only really practical if you do your own printing and it is particularly suited to black and white photography.
This is (in very simplistic terms) the method that Ansel Adams used.
Use Google:
+"Ansel Adams" +"zone system"