On 6 May 2002 22:54:55 GMT, jason.nospam@na.com (Jason M Surprise) wrote:

>This weekend I used my TRV30 to record a birthday party. The subject
>was in a living room with diffuse sun coming in through the living
>room windows. I was standing near the same wall as the windows, so the
>direct sunlight from the windows wasn't in the picture. Because the
>room in general wasn't lit well, my TRV was setting exposure to the max.
>This caused the subjects faces to be overexposed, really white compared
>to the rest of the picture. I tried manually turning down exposure, but
>it just made the room darker which I didn't like. I also played with
>the different picture modes, but couldn't get anything to work well. Is
>there anything I could have done to make the subjects come in better?

Probably not from your shooting location - the ratio of
lightest tone to darkest was WAY beyond the limited range
of one-CCD camcorders. Without moving, your only options
were to raise the room light average, or decrease exposure
until the faces were more correctly exposed (letting the
room go black). Best option would have been to move to
the side so that the predominant light on at least one side
of the faces was similar to the room light (and letting
the sun-lit highlights "burn out"), or moving so as to
face the sunlight, increasing exposure enough to show the
shadow sides some and letting the backlight burn out...).
BTW, if you need more exposure range at the low-end limit,
some can be had by turning off the stabilizer. In addition,
if you are at +18db gain and the color is almost gone
(TRV30), using "portrait" mode will restore color, even at
+18db (you can also stay in normal program mode, but switch
to manual exposure and move one notch darker to +15db
gain - the brightness will be slightly reduced, but the
color will be much better. Also BTW, the eyepiece finder
on the TRV30 is not good for exposure evaluation since it
is too bright - best is setting the panel finder brightness
to a value that looks similar to a TV hooked up to the
camera when pointing the camera at familiar medium-tone
parts of the room, leaving it at that setting, and using
the panel for an interior exposure guide when auto is
not working well for you...