Hi,

Recently i bought a Elan 7E kit along with a 420 EX lens. I shot almost 12 rolls. The film roll used was a consumer level Kodak Gold 200 ASA. I had set the metering mode to Partial metering. The mode was set to P mode. And i chose the center focus element. Most of the day photos were taken with the Fill flash ON. i.e i had switched on the 420 EX. The results were excellent.

But i was not satisfied with the photos taken in the night. The subject was getting over exposed at 28 mm when there was a dark background. The same settings mentioned above were maintained even during night photography. The exposure used to be balanced if the zoom was increased from 28 mm(above 35mm). Is there anything wrong in my settingd or Is it a bug with ELAN 7 or do i have to change the metering mode Or is it anything to do with the 420 EX falsh.

I could even notice that couple of photos were grainy during dim light.

Please let me know.

-Venkat

-- Venkat (venkumc@yahoo.com), June 07, 2001

Answers

First of all, the flash doesn't use partial metering. It switches to E-TTL (evaluative for all of the metering areas). So using partial metering with full flash is mostly a wasted effort. It still works for the ambient exposure though, so for fill flash, it works for all but the flash part. Choosing the center AF point will bias the flash exposure to that point however. Confusing, huh?

Anyway, I suspect that the subject is too small for the large area of dark background. Ideally, the camera's evaluative flash meter should recognize what's happening and compensate for it, but if the subject is too small (using the 28mm lens) it will probably be overexposed since the camera's meter sees so much darkness around the center subject. No camera is perfect in this regard, but the Elan 7e is supposed to be pretty good. Moving closer or zooming in will make the subject appear larger and the camera's metering system will give it more attention.

Another possibility is that you had your subject off center and the flash was trying to give the center area surrounding the chosen AF point a proper dose of light. Since the background was now in the center, the off center subject became overexposed.

Final possibility: The exposure was messed up by the printer. Actually, this is the most likely because you report that some areas seem grainy. A sure sign of underexposure or overprinting for 200 ISO film. No matter how good your camera's meter is, if the printer's auto exposure system sees all the dark areas surrounding your subject, it will try to brighten things up. You can take them back and ask for them to be reprinted correctly.

When it's all said & done, you can't tell anything (almost) about exposure by looking at prints. Try it again with a slide film & see what happens.

-- Jim Strutz (j.strutz@gci.net), June 07, 2001.