PURPOSE: To prevent blooming in the case of picking up a high luminance object.

CONSTITUTION: A video signal from an image pickup element is fed to a photometry circuit A6 in usual image pickup, a photometry signal is generated from a mean luminous quantity of a designated area of an image pickup face and a system controller 8 applies a prescribed VSUB voltage to the image pickup element 3 via a VSUB voltage control circuit 17. In the case of picking up a high luminance object, since an aperture detected by an iris encoder 12 is small, the system controller 8 controls a photometry circuit changeover circuit 16 to select a photometry circuit B15 to decrease the VSUB voltage in response to a photometry signal in response to the mean luminous quantity of the high luminance area of the image pickup face.