Exposure Help

[Newbie]

Firstly hi to every one on the forum.

You've probably been asked a thousand times about exposure but I'm struggling here.
Had my 400d around a year now & I really seem to struggle with capturing blue skies.Just had a weekend in Snowdonia & some photos the sky was perfect & blue but mainly on Landscape setting I was using a Canon 10-22 but if i went into AV mode trying to use a smaller apperture to help keep every thing in focus I seem to either end up too dark or too light .
If I get the sky good the forground is dark or visa versa.
I even tried AE lock but not sure what you lock your exposure on is it something dark to lighten the skies or something light to darken them just seems so hit & miss .I thought the idea is if you set said F stop for depth of field shutter speed would be set automatically for correct exposure.
Thanks in anticipation
Newbie

 

[chivers67]

Have you any of the images?

The thing with sky it often can depend on the angle of the sun in relation to your camera taking position/lens. It may be worth getting a grey grad filter so you can balance landscape epxosure with sky.

Have you tried bracketing ??

Normally a camera that is on Aperture priority can deal with normal scenes so I'd be surprised to hear that your camera hasn't been able to give you some good and well exposed photographs especially as it's a canon.

Is the lens aperture stopping down and opening ok?

 

[Cathald]

You need to get yourself a set of ND grads to balance up the difference between the dark foreground and the bright sky

Cathal

 

[seriousrikk]

If the sun is illuminating the foreground then you should get a good even exposure

Do you have any samples you can show us? Would make it easier to judge before we advice you to do this/buy that.

 

[Newbie]

The nice blue skies were on landscape mode then the waterfall with a slow exposure for the water turns out like it did the last one was an early morning shot but again the sky is horrible.

Thanks for your replies

Basically I'm trying to get away from the automatic modes but my results don't encourage me to.

These were all taken in Snowdonia this last weekend

 

[The Matt]

It's nothing to do with what mode you're using, it's the brightness of the scene. In the first few you're metering for ground in bright sunlight, so it's similar in brightness to the sky. In the last two, most of your scene is in shadow. You have metered quite well for the shadowy areas (maybe a touch underexposed on the waterfall) but the ground in the sun and the sky is that much brighter that it is overexposed. As has already been said, you need to either merge two exposures (one for the sky, one for the ground) or get some ND grad filters.