Tuesday 24 September 2019

exposure - Why am I getting black photos when I use the Manual feature on my DSLR?


I was taking photos a few days ago, and I had it set to Manual. After about four photos, the rest started coming out black. I could see through my eyepiece clearly, and it took the photo normally, but when I reviewed it they were all black.



Answer



"Manual" means that it is up to you to set the correct exposure. It's conspicuous that you didn't mention what exposure settings you were using, so I'm not sure that you realize that you have to do that yourself.


DSLRs have light meters in the viewfinder which show how over/under-exposed your manual settings are, according to the auto-exposure system. On Nikon cameras it shows up as a bar:


+        0        -

<--|--|--|--|--|-->

If the meter is in the middle, then the autoexposure system considers the picture correctly exposed. If the meter is to the left, it is overexposed, and to the right, it is underexposed.


Of course, there's no point in using manual if you blindly follow the autoexposure system's recommendations. But if the meter shows severe underexposure, then you're probably underexposing the image and will get a black image.


Increase the aperture or decrease the shutter speed, or switch to an automatic mode (such as P, S, or A).


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