In order to set up your camera for backlight situations, you can do a couple of things. One thing you can do is try to turn on the flash, so go ahead and press the flash button right here and just turn it down to force the flash and hit set. Forcing the flash is going to brighten up shadows in dark areas even when the camera thinks there is already enough light.

However, this may not be enough; in fact, it probably won’t be enough. If you’re too far away from the subject for example, the flash is certainly not going to be powerful enough and even if you are close enough. It still may not be as powerful as you need it to be, so the other thing you can do is use an external flash, put very powerful external flash on here, and use that. If you don’t have that option, what I would recommend is you can go ahead, turn the flash off, and use the spot meter. Press the metering button right over here to access the metering modes and move over to spot meter. Hit the spot meter function again to escape and you can see now I have these two brackets and now the camera’s meter is going to look just what’s inside those two brackets to judge the proper exposure. So for example, if I look at something very dark, like 133 everything gets very, very bright because it’s trying to make that dark subject 18% gray.

Likewise, if I look at something very, very bright like the background it’s going to make everything much darker because it’s trying to darken down the bright area and make that 18% gray, so you can use this and you can focus on your subject. The focusing square is right there in the center, just press the shutter button halfway to focus on your subject. You may have to try a couple of times, press the button halfway, if it can’t find the focus. You may not be over something with enough contrast, so in my case I may just be physically too close to the subject, so let me try this again. Press the shutter button halfway. The camera is able to lock the focus point, my focusing square is green and I heard a double beep.

So now, my exposure is where I set my focus because these two is in the center and I cannot recompose and when I’m ready take the picture.

Now, the other thing you can do, you can do a combination of the two, which means use the flash and use the spot meter. You can also try and do this, press the menu button to access the main menu and go ahead and scroll down until we get to eye contrast. A default eye contrast is off, you can change that and turn that to Auto, and what this will do is try to increase the brightness and shadows, so shadow details things that are a little bit darker than 18% grade. I’ll try and kind of bring that up a little bit and brighten that up. Now, you can access the eye contrast control via the playback menu as well, once you’ve already taken a picture, but if you’re going to do it, I prefer doing a before to maintain the best image quality.

Once you’ve already taken the picture at least as a jpeg, you won’t be able to apply this to line images. But, if take it as a jpeg, you’ll be able to later apply this feature, but then you’re saving a jpeg again over a jpeg so that somewhat decreases the image quality that of course is technically speaking for the most part. You really won’t be able to see a difference but it does decrease the image quality, so do that before and see how that works out. Usually, I don’t do this, so I do that off, then menu to come back I’ll go ahead and use this spot meter, again like with every picture, make sure my white balance is set up. Remember, we set up the shortcut button, you just press that to access white balance, confirm the white balance to set up the way you need it, press set. Set the flash the way you need it to be and ISO also because you are exposing for a dark subject, you may need to increase this up from 80 and I’ll show you what I mean.

Again, I’ll look at the dubs here, I’ll press the shutter button halfway, and now I can see that my shutter speed is 160 from the second and in other cases. It maybe even slower than this, right now 160 per second I can’t hand hold so that will be fine, but in your situation if this drops below 160 per second, I’ll recommend increasing the ISO and trying again.

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