Here's an example of what I'm complaining about: http://members.aol.com/ernreed/2bright.jpg
The only thing I did to this image was resize it in Photoshop Elements. Much of the EXIF data seems to have survived this. ----------- Yep, the meter nicely exposed for the large shadow area right in the center of the image. This is what program metering is designed to do. That said, center-weighted might have given the same result with this scene because the dark area is so well centered. Basically, you've got a tough scene here with too large a contrast range. Color negative film might do better than digital with such a scene, but it would probably have difficulties too. I think the bottom line is that there's not too much you could do with such a scene. We could advise you to recompose without the background, but if you are photographing moving kids, obviously that's hard. You can probably fix the light foreground to some degree with PS Elements. Beyond that, I do recommend that you try center-weighted averaging. Joe
