Drummer boy - sky vs subject question

luv

I took this photo at a march yesterday. The drum core was in the deep shadow of the building camera right. To get them I ended up over exposing the sky. I briefly tried to use fill flash to balance the people and the brillant blue sky but things were moving fast and I never got it right. Is there something I could have done to retain the bright cloud filled sky?

JMP

luv wrote:

I took this photo at a march yesterday. The drum core was in the deep shadow of the building camera right. To get them I ended up over exposing the sky. I briefly tried to use fill flash to balance the people and the brillant blue sky but things were moving fast and I never got it right. Is there something I could have done to retain the bright cloud filled sky?

i think you should take exposure readings from the highlights first, once you get detail from the sky, the dark places are easy to fix, with flash or software, but if you get just a white section in the picture, that detail is lost forever, i believe that happens only in digital, not sure though.

imonk

Dynamic Range
Hi Luv,

This is all about Dynamic Range. Every camera has a certain DR whether it's the DR of a digital chip or the DR of a certain type of film. The DR is basically the range between the darkest and the lightest areas that the sensor/film can capture.

Any picture with a high contrast between light and dark will be a compromise. If you had exposed for the sky in this picture then the people would have been under-exposed and you would have had to lighten them in post processing. This can increase noise and degrade quality if you have to lighten it too much. In this instance you exposed for the darker areas and so the lighter parts of the image (the sky) have been 'burned out'. That just means that they were too bright for the exposure you selected.

How do you get around it? Well there isn't much you can do about increasing the DR of your camera. You could set your contrast settings to low and shoot in RAW but it wouldn't be enough for this scene.

As I said, it's always a compromise when you're shooting during a bright day. You could have exposed for the foreground and then added some negative exposure compensation until you get the foreground looking not too dark and the sky not too bright, but you couldn't have exposed to get both perfect.

Landscape photographers usually shoot in the evenings or mornings and also use ND grad filters to reduce the brightness of the sky and therefore reduce the brightness difference between sky and land. Portrait photographers love cloudy days so there's no really bright spots of sun. It's all about the difference between the lightest and darkest parts of the scene and it's always about reducing that contrast and compromising.

One other thing, HDR photography. You can take a number of shots and blend them using software, or you could take just 2, one for the sky and one for the foreground, then blend them. But for this kind of scene you prob didn't have enough time. I'd say you chose the right option since you didn't have time and the most important thing here is the foreground and not the sky. Also, I suppose you could have shot them so they were front lit (so the sun is behind you and lighting them). This way the sky wouldn't have been so much brighter then the foreground.

Hope this all makes sense and I'm not waffling too much

Good luck
Ian

heatherfeather

Here is what I do: Use the Flash exposure compensation button and meter for the sky and then crank up your flash to aprox +1 or more for fill when taking the photo. I think that is standard procedure for most portrait photographers

imonk

heatherfeather wrote:

Here is what I do: Use the Flash exposure compensation button and meter for the sky and then crank up your flash to aprox +1 or more for fill when taking the photo. I think that is standard procedure for most portrait photographers

Yes, as Heather says you can use your flash to illuminate your subject while exposing for the brighter spots of your scene, but I'm not sure that would have been enough on this scene without nuking your subject. The results might not be great.

If you want to learn about mixing ambient and flash light then check out strobist.com as it will tell you how to shoot your flashes off camera for better results.

Cheers
Ian

LiquidAir

luv wrote:

I took this photo at a march yesterday. The drum core was in the deep shadow of the building camera right. To get them I ended up over exposing the sky. I briefly tried to use fill flash to balance the people and the brillant blue sky but things were moving fast and I never got it right. Is there something I could have done to retain the bright cloud filled sky?

Here's how to approach it. Set your camera on manual manual exposure and set your shutter speed to your max sync speed (1/250?) and your ISO to 100. Next chimp a few shots of the sky to tune your aperture so that you are retaining some detail in the clouds; probably somewhere between f/8 and f/11. Now you just need to get the FEC set right for proper exposure in the foreground.

One thing to note is that you'll be exposing strobe for the drummer in the foreground which will mean the rest of the core will probably fall into shadow (because they are farther away) which may or may not give you a result you are happy with.