>Neuman - Ruether wrote:

>>On Sat, 11 Jan 2003 04:10:14 GMT, Sum <sumlin@earthlink.net>

>>wrote:

>>>I am not sure if this is some settings on my PC9 I should have adjusted

>>>but we went skiing and I taped some video of my 3 year old playing in

>>>the slow and falling and stuff, and the snow being so white, and the sky

>>>being white and everything being so bright, the video turned out to be

>>>really bad, like it was over-exposed and at times out of focus. Of

>>>course when I was shooting it I did not noticed since I was wearing

>>>sunglasses. Stupid me.

>>>

>>>Any advise for future shooting what I should do in terms of settings or

>>>additional equipment to compensate?

>>Go into the menus and select "auto shutter - on" (this

>>enables high shutter speeds, removing the need for a

>>ND filter in bright light). It may be that you had

>>manual exposure set - try using auto, selecting "sand

>>and snow" to avoid underexposure from the predominant

>>bright snow (meters like to turn snow grey...;-).

>>As others pointed out, a polarizer can be useful (for

>>saturating colors a bit, and reducing tone level in

>>some areas) - but you must adjust its rotation for

>>the best effect, not always convenient...

>> David Ruether

On Sun, 12 Jan 2003 08:15:07 GMT, Sum <sumlin@earthlink.net> wrote:

>

>Thanks David. I will try this next time. After reviewing the tapes I

>also noticed this happening not only for the snow area, after my ski

>trip we went to LA to see the Rose parade on new years day, and my

>shooting of the parade was also inferior. Many of the bright floats

>(white in color) under the sun were blended in with the sky, colorful

>floats in blue/green looked great.

>

>So these new gagets are still far from "fool proof"...I do need to RTFM

>after all.

Yes. One of the disadvantages of 1-CCD cameras compared

with good 3-chippers is the easy loss of highlight

information (see the daylight examples at:

www.David-Ruether-Photography.com/camcorder--comparison.htm).

With the Sony 1-chippers, you can bias the auto exposure

a bit darker by selecting the "spotlight" program mode,

if highlights are "burning out" (though this is hard to

see in the finders - the "real" image retains a bit more

highlight detail than is shown in the VFs, even if these

are properly set for brightness...).