oldtimer new t5i backlighting difficulty

[Kawarthan]

Most of my shots are of birds. With my old manual 35mm slr, I opened up the fstops by two notches for a slight over-exposure and voila no more black birds or detailless airplanes.  With my new fandangled digital rebel t5i seems I am having great difficulty overcoming the genius software.  I need a mode where I can preset an overexposure setting with or without flash as a preset mode or something.  The backlight compensation 'averaging' software is somewhat useless due to the extreme contrast of shooting into the sky.  Can I preset this without the software compensating by raising the shutter speed and basically same old same old blue background and black bird.  Flash is good close-up, but most of my picks are out of effective range.  Yes I've read the manual back and forth, it is like an ad for drugs, 2 lines of info and 2 pages of warnings.  Help before I go e-bay on this amazing little rubicks cube of a camera.

[TCampbell · Accepted solution]

The camera has you covered.  You want to use "Exposure Compensation".

See this:  http://kbsupport.cusa.canon.com/system/selfservice.controller?CONFIGURATION=1011&PARTITION_ID=1&secu...

As long as you are in any of the "creative zone" (where you control the shot) modes... P, Av, or Tv, then you can press and hold the "Av +/-" button on the back of the camera while turning the front dial (main dial) left or right to increase or decrease the exposure.  

This tells the computer to meter... but deliberately add or decrease the exposure.    Each "click" (or smal tick mark on the scale you can see through the viewfinder) is 1/3rd of a stop.  Two "clicks" would be +2/3rds of a stop overexposed.

Don't forget to zero it back out when you're done shooting or you'll wonder why the rest of your shots are coming out over-exposed.

Good luck!

[TCampbell · Accepted solution]

The camera has you covered.  You want to use "Exposure Compensation".

See this:  http://kbsupport.cusa.canon.com/system/selfservice.controller?CONFIGURATION=1011&PARTITION_ID=1&secu...

As long as you are in any of the "creative zone" (where you control the shot) modes... P, Av, or Tv, then you can press and hold the "Av +/-" button on the back of the camera while turning the front dial (main dial) left or right to increase or decrease the exposure.  

This tells the computer to meter... but deliberately add or decrease the exposure.    Each "click" (or smal tick mark on the scale you can see through the viewfinder) is 1/3rd of a stop.  Two "clicks" would be +2/3rds of a stop overexposed.

Don't forget to zero it back out when you're done shooting or you'll wonder why the rest of your shots are coming out over-exposed.

Good luck!

[Kawarthan · Accepted solution]

Thanks so much, this works for me, guess a little frustration on my part.  I see all the scene settings on these cameras as an encumberance.  The camera was a gift, it is amazingly over-complicated.  I am a bit old school (totallly manual 35mm Yashica) for 30 years,  I figure all the dramatic scene effects settings could be done after the fact with software on a computer.  It seems like I have to decode what some programmer thinks the camera should do for you, and I don't think he is a photograper lol.   Do they make a camera body with fstop, shutter speed, asa and a priority for the flash  ONLY?  I don't need the options on the switch.  I would gladly trade this unit ( T5i Rebel used twice, with zoom lens as well) for a stripped down version, if available.  Thank you so much for the tip, youtube is full of advice and tips but this one eluded me.

[TCampbell]

The "scene" modes are there mostly to help beginners.  Since you've been shooting manually for years, you know what to do when you want a broad depth of field for, example, a landscape shot -- and you'd know how to speed up the shutter to freeze action.  A novice might not know these things, so they put a mode on the dial with an icon of someone running and ... you get the idea.  

On many of Canon's mid-range bodies, the modes are replaced by a single "SCN" (scene) setting and you use a menu to pick which scene you want.  

On Canon's high-end cameras the modes aren't there at all -- because the customers buying those cameras would know how to bias the exposure toward the result they need and the scene modes would just be extra clutter on the menu system.

Incidentally... as you know how to shoot on manual, if you put the camera in manual mode, the front dial normally sets shutter speed but holding that same AV +/- button you use to control exposure compensation will set the aperture instead.  On the mid-range and above bodies the back of the camera has a large dial positioned so that it can comfortably be operated by your thumb while you look through the viewfinder.  Your index finger controls shutter and your thumb controls aperture or exposure compensation.