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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tdodd" data-source="post: 1404940" data-attributes="member: 55450">Glad to help. Here are some examples.... The first image was shot in manual mode, which gave me the correct exposure whether the background was 100% sky, 100% trees or a mixture. It was shot with my 40D and 100-400 at 400mm, f/5.6, 1/1000, 800 ISO. Metering was in evaluative mode but I simply pushed my exposure as high as I could without blowing the sky (checking the histogram and for blinking highlight clipping warnings) before even bothering to shoot a bird, and that meant a perfect ETTR raw capture for whatever came into view within that quadrant of the sky. This has had no PP other than resize and sharpen after resizing. The second image is again shot with manual exposure but this time with my 30D at 200mm, f/4, 1/1000, 400 ISO. So that's a stop faster on the aperture (70-200 f/2.8 lens allowed me to use f/4) and a stop slower on the ISO, so effectively an identical exposure. In this one I have blown a tiny bit of the sky but ever so slightly and easily recoverable. As the sky was so flat there was no detail there to be seen so it's really not much of an issue. The only tweak on this is a small adjustment to white balance and a crop to ~1600x1066 before resizing to ~50%. Once again this was sharpened after resizing. I have done nothing to affect the exposure at all. I'm sure some PP work could improve these images but I just wanted to illustrate how manual exposure allowed me to precisely set my exposure for optimum raw capture, giving me the maximum data I could with which to tweak the images. The third image was shot on Aperture Priority with 0EV compensation. As you will note, the exposure is a disaster. Remember that I am basically shooting straight into my light source - that great big cloudy softbox. I chose f/4 at 400 ISO and the camera picked 1/6400 as my shutter speed, vs 1/1000 for my manual exposures. This is basically about 3 stops underexposed, the sky being at middle grey instead of on the brink of turning white. The fourth image is the same image file as the third, but with exposure increased by 3 stops in Lightroom. These small images don't really highlight the degraded quality from the 3 stop exposure boost, but consider how much better it would have been to capture the exposure correctly in the first place rather than to lift everything, including noise and the risk of banding, in PP. The fifth image is once more with the 40D and 100-400 at 400mm, f/5.6, 1/1000, 800 ISO - the exact same exposure as the shots high in the sky. There is margin to increase the exposure by 0.6 stops before blowing anything, but that is because there is no bright sky in the image at all. However, the light on the bird is the same here as it was when it was high in the sky, and the exposure should be just the same. I dare say some PP would improve this image somewhat but this example is untouched - just resized and sharpened. No WB, no exposure/contrast changes etc..</blockquote>

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