Question:
How do you adjust for photos shot into the sun, like taking a picture of a house and the sun is coming over the roof? When you take the picture the house is dark and shadowy. How do you adjust for it?

Answer: The effect of shooting into the sun is called “backlighting”, because the source of light is coming from behind the subject. Because the metering system in the camera is taking the brightness of the sun as well as the shadowed subject into account when it calculates the exposure, the sun skews the exposure so that the subject is underexposed. The default- metering mode setting in Olympus digital cameras is ESP—Electro Selective Pattern. ESP uses a pattern that averages the exposure with different emphases from selected areas of the image read by the imaging sensor. To get more accurate exposures in backlit situations, use the SPOT metering option. SPOT metering uses a small area in the center of autofocus target frame to more accurately meter specific elements in the image. If the metering spot is centered on the subject when the shutter is pressed, the subject will be more accurately exposed, and in the case of backlit subjects the sun will not be taken into account when the camera calculates the exposure.

Also, when shooting into the sun, image quality can be enhanced by shading the lens from the sun with your hand or a card. This will yield a cleaner image free of lens flare. In photography this term is called “flagging.” Just remember to keep your hand out of the image frame when you take the shot.

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