The Na Pali Coastline - Where Dinosaurs Roam

windoze

one of the most, correction! THE MOST BEAUTIFUL Place on Earth Ive ever seen.... Looks to me like the land of the Dinosaurs...

Excuse my poor post processing skills - i am learning as fast as i can.


I found shooting manual very difficult on these sea cliffs - where do heck do i meter? Meter the sky - land too dark. Meter the land - sky to light, very confusing to me, i did my best given what i had...


















troy

Tanuki

Nice!
What a great place. My wife and I backpacked it in 2004 and felt the same sense of awe that you did. There's not too many places where you can see 4000 feet cliffs, let alone beautifully sculped ones like those.

I like your photos. It looks like you had trouble with processing and/or metering, so you might try posting an unprocessed version so others can better judge your exposure and post processing results.

Did you use a polarizer? If not, I would suggest using a polarizer next time to darken the sky and bring down the dynamic range of the scene. It will also help cut through some of the haze.

Regarding metering, it seems to me that the sky is an important element of the scene and therefore you don't want to overexpose it, even if you have to sacrifice some shadow detail. A quick way to do this is to ignore the meter and just bracket like hell, then check the histogram and blinking highlights in all your exposures until you find the brightest exposure that didn't blow out the sky.

Then, with that eposure setting, I would put my camera in bracket mode to take a +0.7, 0 and -0.7 exposure. This is because the histogram and blinking highlights might be affected by the contrast settings in the camera and I may find a little more or less detail in the highlights when I get to post-processing the RAW image (you were shooting RAW, right?).

There are other ways to approach the same problem. For example, if you know from experience that you can get acceptable highlight detail in post processing at say, +3.5 EV, you can spot meter on the clouds with your meter set to +3.5 and then stick with that exposure.

Good luck and have fun!

Regards,
Mike