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I have a question regarding exposure. I could be trying to do something that just can't be done or more likely i'm doing something wrong.The other day i was trying to take a photo of my car for someone. I was standing in very slight dappled shade of a small tree in the mid afternoon. The car is fine but the sky is blown out horribly. A few handy hints wouldn't go amiss.
I got the same result however i set the light metering, centre weighted, average weighted, spot weighted etc.
If i locked the exposure first on the sky and then composed and took the shot i got.
Lovely sky as it should be but the car has dissappeared into the darkness. Surely it should be possible to have the exposure correct..or not? Any links to articles or books worthwhile to but for someone groping their way up from p+s cameras would be much appreciated.
The camera is an Olympus E-500.
Thanks
Paul
Follow Ups:
G'day Herg,
You can save it quickly--with layer and brush as shown in Pshop-or the better way next time use a tripod--take two shots one for the B/ground don't move the camera--second for the car-put one over the other in Pshop, and with a layer mask paint out or in the unwanted area and flatten the result--Voila!
RAW format is best if your camera has this function as you can see here the Jpg artifacts start to appear when you lighten extreme shadow area too much.
The LL Link explains the Blending version further
Good Shooting,
Des
...when it seems to me the simplest solution lies elsewhere. HTML tag not allowed
I said ND filter so.....
...I basically said I think the real solution is to take such a picture when the light is different or it is a in different relationship to the sun so that you don't have to labor in the post-production environment to save it.This insight derives from my work as a filmmaker. We try to avoid shooting exteriors with the camera looking toward the bright part of the sun and shooting in harsh, high contrast, mid-day light.
I asked in my original post if i was simply trying to do something that couldn't be done given the light situation. I was hoping that the software built in to digital cameras might proveide some kind of workaround that i wasn't aware of or that there might be another solution. Joes suggestion of a graduated neutral density filter seems a sensible solution and one which enables me to use the camera in difficult situations.Regards
Paul
...of course that's fine, but if it's relatively easy to wait or reposition such a thing as a car for a situation better suited to a photograph, then I'd say that's the avenue of least resistance.
Paul didn't have access to a dozen Gaffers & grips to hold scrims and 5k's.Yes, I held an I.A.T.S.E. Stagehand union card.
When you can't sit around all day playing cards waiting for that perfect angle. You have to find the right tools, agree?
...I'm a documentary filmmaker and we don't use the kind of large crews you're talking about.
Why all the apparent resentment at the suggestion of adjusting the shooting strategy? It's completely obvious that if it's a situation where you CAN'T control the light then you have to deal with it in "post."But the photo in question was one that could have been handled in a number of different ways; at least it appears so on the surface. A photo where that sort of control is not possible is another matter.
As my initial foray into this forum has been rather unpleasant, I think I'll go away now...
I reviewed the original post and there was nothing there suggesting that an alternate shooting setup wasn't practical.
markets in which to appy our trades. Than the majority of shooters here. Thus my simpler answers.
...
I regard all digital photography as "cheating" because there are so many post-processing tricks that one can do. :-)What you have here is an essentially black car that dominates the field read by your exposure meter, and most "integrated" or "matrix" light measuring systems (e.g. the one that Minolta used) are weighted towards the bottom half of the picture. Nikon's "classic" center-weighted is not; it is symmetrical. I have not experimented enough with the newer matrix system (which is one of the choices on my 9-year old N70 film camera) to know whether it bottom weights or not; but I would guess that it does.
So, in the good ol' daze, to avoid all of these complications I would have taken my hand-held incident light meter and read the light falling on the car. If I only wanted to use one frame for the picture, that probably would have gotten me a useable negative with most color films, which would have printed an acceptable picture. Using Kodak Tri-X black and white film with the chemistry and development techniques that I used, there definitely would have been a useable negative and, in printing, I could have "burned in" any highlights and, if necessary, the sky.
You don't have one you say? Well, the Kodak Darkroom guide for black and white used to include a grey card which you can use instead; just fill the viewfinder with the grey card and make a note of the exposure value.
Can't find a Kodak Darkroom guide because the world's gone digital?
Do the compensation yourself. Read the exposure for the sky and for the car. Exposing for the sky give you what looks like about 1 f-stop underexposed for everything. Split the difference between the reading on the car and 1 f-stop less than the sky and take one shot . . . or just bracket that exposure with 1 f-stop on either side of it and take a total of 3 shots.
The use of a horizontal polarizing filter, by killing glare off of shiny surfaces, also increases apparent color saturation and darkens the sky. The filter comes on a rotatable mount, so you can rotate it for best effect. Sometimes, however, the polarizing filter will fool the thru the lens metering system (don't ask me how, or why). These are much more widely available that the gradient filters that Joe M is talking about.
Paul is this your camera? http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/olympuse500/from Ken Rockwell
> > > I carry a Tiffen 0.6 graduated neutral density ("Two Stop ND Grad") in a regular circular screw-in mount. "0.6" is the scientific term (D/log10) for "two stops." You can get it here. (Again, poke around that site to find the size you need.) I have no idea why we call them "graduated" filters, as if they have been granted an academic degree, instead of "gradiated" or "gradiented," which would imply that there is a gradient involved as indeed there is. These are clear glass with one half colored a dark gray and a smooth transitional gradient between the two areas. I only use these only in cases of extreme brightness difference between the sky and ground. This also is a filter that destroys your image if used when it shouldn't be. Photo author Tim Fitzharris and sometimes Galen Rowell use a little too much of these filters for my taste because they turn the sky and mountain tops unnaturally dark. I prefer using a weaker grad filter. I find the square filter systems like the Cokin and Singh-ray too bothersome. Avoid the square systems for rangefinder cameras: they cover up parts of the viewfinder and rangefinder windows, and even worse, one cannot view through the lens anyway to take advantage of the additional flexibility of the square systems on a rangefinder camera. The reason for the one-stop filter factor in the tables below for the two-stop grad for use with rangefinder cameras is because the average factor through the whole filter is one stop (no stops at the top and two at the bottom). < < <
or sideways.
Often, you want to balance light intensity between two areas within a scene. This is important outdoors to allow more sky detail while properly exposing the foreground. Exposing for the foreground will produce a washed-out, over-exposed sky, exposing for the sky will leave the foreground dark, underexposed.
♪ moderate Mart £ ♫ ☺ Planar Asylum
Good evening Paul,That´s a pretty extreme case: a very dark coloured object, against a highlighted background... What´s the brightness ratio betwen both: a few thousand times?
Your camera´s sensor is not prepared to handle that much information. Fuji was able to somewhat deal with that problem by developing a sensor with two different photodiodes (different sizes, different sensitivity) at each photosite: that approach gives you a big RAW file, with info about highlights and shadows being better handled.
In the good old days of chemical photography, you could get a wide latitude by choosing the right slide film. And, in B/W, you still could go further by choosing the right developer..., none of which are you allowed to do in digiphoto.
If you look at the page in the link, you´ll find a more detailed explanation. Don´t forget to look at the pictures in the "Samples"
Anyhow, RAW files will give you a wider latitude than JPEG. And Photoshop, when properly used, can do some very good things...
Regards
BF
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