Shot with Canon 40D, EF-S 10-22
f16 1/200 ISO 200
10mm, RAW
Some tweaking in DPP to bring the greens out.
Used tripod, remote shutter release
Shot around 2pm EST
I'm estimating here because this monitor is "dark" - a properly exposed sky produced an under-exposed foreground. What does the histogram look like? Skewed to the left?
For RAW, IIRC, for an image such as this with lots of dynamic range, if the foreground is properly exposed (histogram probably skewed to the right) you can easily recover what appears to be blown hi-lites in the image (the skewed area at the right). I believe the rationale is you can recover that which is recorded but not apparent ( hi-lite detail ) while you can not add detail which was never recorded (trying to recover under-exposed shadow areas).
Similar to shooting snow - the meter will expose for an 18% grey card - hence the image is muddy, lacking contrast...exposure needs to compensate for the metering effect.
Here, you might try to mask the foreground and use curves to brighten and add some snap. I'd be interested in how much detail you can pull back...
regards,
my 2 ¢
Bob
<edit> Similar to reading on another board: suggestion to add 1.5 - 2 stops exposure to capture a "white" wedding dress (or best - take an incident reading and shoot totally manually)
Edited on May 26, 2008 at 08:32 AM
May 26, 2008 at 07:50 AM
Steve Spencer Offline • • • • • • • Upload & Sell: On
I grew up in Michigan and love its beaches and I lived in West Michigan for a number of years, so as a fellow Michigander I want to encourage you to keep shooting. There are many good landscape shots to be had in your area. Your problem is the overcast day and what is often called flat light. I don't think there is too much dynamic range in this shot, just not a good quality of light like you get at sunrise and in West Michigan especially sunset. You have to take advantage of the beautiful sunsets and you have and you need to get down closer to the water. A shot like this can be very nice, but the foreground has to have very pretty flowers or more likely on these sorts of beaches very nice beach grass. On a day with flat light you can also go right down to the beach on get a strong neutral density filter and take a long exposure of the waves coming in. This can have a very lovely effect especially if you can catch an outcropping that highlights the waves breaking. Because of the flat light you can get a lot longer exposure. I hope this helps and keep shooting.
Thanx for the advice Steve & Bob. Sounds like there is some processing work I can do to improve the existing pictures but, root cause might be just bad subject matter, composition and quality of light.
The horizon is near 50/50 - should be 1/3 down
The grass in front is framed through - should get it all in
The sky is not clear - needs a nd grad picture.
This is a great spot I would encourage you to keep on trying and try a poloarizer and nd gra or bracketed exposure and hdr.
Here is a quick re-work of the RAW using CS3 - ACR to set sky, then layers & selections, levels, some paint-with-light plugin for this version. Didn't do any sharpening, fine tuning needed but not from work and uncalibrated (read quite dark) monitor....
The horizon is near 50/50 - should be 1/3 down
The grass in front is framed through - should get it all in
The sky is not clear - needs a nd grad picture.
This is a great spot I would encourage you to keep on trying and try a poloarizer and nd gra or bracketed exposure and hdr.
Hi Scott. Thanx for taking the time to comment. Can you dumb down your explanation a bit more? I want to make sure I understand (i.e., nd grad? "framed thorugh?", hdr?)
pawlowski6132 wrote:
Hi Scott. Thanx for taking the time to comment. Can you dumb down your explanation a bit more? I want to make sure I understand (i.e., nd grad? "framed thorugh?", hdr?)
thanx again
Neutral Density graduated filter = ND Grad - Has dark grey at top to allow balancing of sky (bright) and land. I use Cokin P holder and Cokin nd grad with a circular polarizer when I do these kinds of pictures.
The grass in the front has the frame going through the grass at mid height - for me this distracts from the picture.
HDR is a technique of taking 3 or more pictures at varying exposures and then recombining them with software. It has a similar affect as using a ND Grad filter. Photomatix or Photoshop both do this.
Easy: Process this image twice! Open the original raw image and adjust the exposure for the foreground and hit "open". Then open the image from the folder again and adjust the exposure so that you have the most detail in the sky, but have left the foreground to go dark. Don't open the image yet! Go to the HSL panel in CS3 and click on the luminance tab. Bring the luminance on the blue slider down to -40 and see if you get some blues. I wouldn't go further than -80. Now open that image as well. Then hit select>all to either image and layer it on top so that you have 1 image with two layers. Depending on which one is on top, use the eraser tool in a fine mode to erase either the sky or the foreground to make a more evenly lit piece.
and uncalibrated (read quite dark) monitor....