Last week-end we photographed a wonderful Catholic Baptism in a beautiful Church in Riverside California.
The interior of this Church was quite dark with most of the light coming from the stained glass windows and a few small lights hanging from the ceiling.
The first picture shown here was shot at f5.6, 1/60 @ ISO 5600 on my D3. It's a decent image that shows lots of details about the interior of the Church. But with all that detail, the exposure completely missed the true mood and feeling that was present. The camera did exactly what it was designed to do, give an average exposure. The camera did not know that the interior of this church needed to be underexposed to give the correct mood.
In this photo, I underexposed the ambient light by two stops and used a touch of fill light to properly expose the priest. There was an amber warming filter on my flash to keep the color temperature close to that of the warm ambient light. To me, this image is much more interesting to look at. Sometimes less is more!
