Hi Dave,
The histogram only tells you how many pixels fall into each possible brightness level. Sometimes this can be misleading, because you see in colour, whereas the histogram plot only takes account of brightness (remember how blue sky and clouds appear on B&W film?)
Your first example sounds like a typical image: widely distributed tones. The second example seems to be saying that there is a large number of image pixels at the same brightness level. I would guess that the "blue sky" is accounting for nearly half of the total pixels in the image - all of these are bunched around the same brightness, so out of your 6 million pixels, half are roughly the same brightness as the sky; the remaining 3 million pixels are spread out amongst all the other possible grey levels, so it's going to look like a very low level overall with a huge peak around the average sky brightness.
Typical "studio" shots could easily have a huge histogram peak at the grey level of the backdrop sheet, and yet be perfectly exposed for the subject. As long as the peak isn't off the left (under-exposed) or right(over-exposed) of the graph, your exposure should be okay.
The real question is: does one image appear to be worse than the other? If not, you don't have a problem. You're producing an image, so trust your eyes, not the readings.
-- Kristian
On 14 Jun 2004, at 19:58, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Wonder if any one can offer a suggestion on my flat histograms.
One picture shot this past weekend had a treed background, brown horse and semi colourfull
jumps
and the histogram has a nice wave to it and takes up about 80% of the graph.(1250 at f 4)
Another has about 50% blue sky and brown horse and very colourfull jump, yet the histogram
is flat,
barely off the bottom and a high end midtone spike between the 3rd and 4th column.(1250 at
f6.7)
Day was full sun and some wind.
Both shot in Matrix mode.
Do you think the excess sky may be hindering. I have a mode button I can push for CW
metering when I
press it. Do you think CW might be better in that case or at least lock the AE/AF. I don�t
really have time
to play with exposures as they jump fast IYKWIM.:-)
I can post the pics if you need to see them.
Dave
