<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Rocky:
[qb]LOL....I was afraid that it would be a complicated solution. heh heh
My camera is a Pentax IQZoom 160. It has many settings, but I usually leave everything in automatic. I did try disabling the flash, but it also disabled the auto focus which just created more problems. I probably did it wrong anyway.[/qb] <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Rocky:
I just went to the Pentax website to see if they had the instruction manual, but they don't.
Here's the deal, your camera measures the darkness of the image in the viewerfinder and assumes it's supposed to be medium gray. If you point the camera at a solid black wall, it will try to make that black look gray. If you point it at a solid white wall, it will darken the image to make it look gray.
Your camera appears to measure the darkness at five places in the image: presumably one spot in the center of the viewfinder image and near the four corners. It then averages these five readings to decide how dark to make everything.
You can use this to your advantage. If you put your black WSM's in front of a white wall (or on a concrete driveway) and zoom back just enough so that you have some of the light colored background in the picture, the camera is going to see some black areas and some white areas when it meausures the light. It will average these together, think it is seeing the medium gray it assumes you want, and will give you an exposure that doesn't wash out the light areas or turn the dark areas black.
The trick is not to absolutely fill the viewfiender with the black of the WSM against a dark background. Make sure there are equal areas of light colors and dark colors in the viewfinder.
Some cameras have an adjustment that allows you manually tell the camera to make the photo 1 or 2 steps darker or lighter than what it thinks it should -- to solve just this problem with automatic light metering. Without reading your owner's manual, I don't see any glaring clues that your Pentax has this option, so you might have to do it by adjusting the background behind the WSM