help with shooting outdoors in bright sunlight

thenimirra

I would appreciate some help in shooting outdoor events, such as festivals, in bright sunlight. I had to shoot the Colorado Dragon Boat festival with a specific assignment focusing on sponsor booths and families spending quality time together. Unfortunately, some of my images were greatly overexposed. I shot in RAW which allowed me to save most of them, but does anyone have any tips on how to circumvent this shooting situation?


http://www.picture-yourworld.com/gallery/5684871_G2RoS#350360179_5sa4G

pathfinder

Hi Sheba,

You did not describe how you chose your exposure settings, or what your metering technique was.

I looked at several of your images, many of them were posed with bright sunlight above and behind the subject, with their faces in the shade. In some it seems you used fill flash, but in many I see no evidence in the exif data of flash usage.

Shooting in bright sunlight, or with backlit subjects, are both great times for the use of fill flash, either in manual mode ( if you want to control the brightness of the background) or in Av mode if you want the camera to set the exposure for the background and let the flash light the forground. Fill flash really helps deal with the bright contrast ranges out of doors in sunlight.