In automatic exposure photographing by adjusting light from a strobe light that is reflected by an object to be photographed, if an object with high reflectance such as a glass or mirror exists on the object side, exposure is adjusted to the high-reflectance object, resulting in underexposure of a principal object.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 3-287240 discloses an automatic light adjustment camera. More specifically, the strobe light preliminarily emits light immediately before photographing on the assumption that a principal object is located at an in-focus distance. Light reflected by the object is measured using a photometry sensor capable of dividing the photographing region into a plurality of regions and measuring light in each region. When the photometry result of a given region is higher than the brightness at the photographing distance, a high-reflectance object is determined to exist in this region. This region is excluded from the light adjustment region, eliminating the influence of regular reflection (high reflection).
The automatic light adjustment camera disclosed in patent reference 1 can prevent underexposure by excluding an abnormal reflection region corresponding to a high-reflectance object such as a glass facing the camera. However, an abnormal reflection region cannot be accurately determined from, e.g., a lens having low distance information precision (meaning the precision of information (distance information) obtained by converting the position of a focusing lens after focus adjustment into an object distance), or a short-focus lens through which the object distance cannot be accurately obtained as the object distance becomes longer.