Shooting with the sun in front

Skyline

Skyline

Emmet Brickowski
Suspended / Banned
Messages
4,497
Name
Dave
Edit My Images
No
When taking a photo and the sun is straight in front of you how do I get the sky correct and not washed out?

TreeScape
 
Your settings for this shot seem way off. F/22, 1/60th and ISO 1000 are nowhere near where you need to be shooting on a bright sunny day. You could make sure you're shooting a RAW file not a jpeg, expose for the sky and then bring the shadows up in post processing. Or you could use exposure bracketing, take 3 or 5 shots at different exposures and merge them in post processing.
 
I would certainly use bracketing and combine the shots in LR to produce a 32 bit HDR files.

Dave
 
RichardC27 said:
Your settings for this shot seem way off. F/22, 1/60th and ISO 1000 are nowhere near where you need to be shooting on a bright sunny day. You could make sure you're shooting a RAW file not a jpeg, expose for the sky and then bring the shadows up in post processing. Or you could use exposure bracketing, take 3 or 5 shots at different exposures and merge them in post processing.
Click to expand...
I should have said I meant to shoot at f22 as I wanted that sunburst coming through the tree
 
Skyline said:
I should have said I meant to shoot at f22 as I wanted that sunburst coming through the tree
Click to expand...
Ah yes I suppose you need a small aperture for the starburst, hadn't thought of that. Just struck me as an odd combination of tiny aperture, slow shutter and high ISO. Definitely bracketing is the way to go. A modern high-end smartphone would probably take a better photo than your mirrorless here as they do all the multiple exposure bracketing for you
 
It's best to shoot at base ISO as you increase your ISO you also decrease your available dynamic range. You have probably lost about 3 stops of dynamic range by shooting at ISO 1000.
 
Last edited:
ah5168 said:
It's best to shoot at base ISO as you increase your ISO you also decrease your available dynamic range. You have probably lost about 3 stops of dynamic range by shoot at ISO 1000.
Click to expand...
Ahh, ok. I was just using ap mode so I could get that burst
 
Skyline said:
Ahh, ok. I was just using ap mode so I could get that burst
Click to expand...

I wouldn't worry about the ISO and it's effect too much, not if the camera is a recent one. ISO 1,000 should be ok with an anything like modern camera even if you need to lift the shadows. If any drop in DR affects preserving the sky you can maybe expose more for the sky and raise the shadows a bit more and as long as you don't pixel peep at high magnification and obsess you could be ok, if it's a fairly recent camera and not something like a Canon 20D :D

Maybe you can pull a bit more sky back by applying an Grad ND post capture?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top