Sky often brings exposure challenges for photographers. Clouds can be extremely bright, and forests can be quite dark, for example, presenting a scene that can be beyond the capabilities of the camera to capture detail. This can be very misleading to us as photographers. No matter how bright a sky is or how dark the ground is, your eyes can see both just fine. It takes experience to start to be able to see that a sky is way out of balance in brightness compared to the ground. Don’t be afraid to take the picture, but check it on your LCD to be sure that you aren’t having problems with exposure.
Skies are typically brighter than the ground. They should look bright in the photo-graph if they are, indeed, bright. Your landscape photo will never look its best if white clouds look a dingy gray because of underexposure. White clouds should look white without being washed out. That’s something to look for in your LCD.
Often, your camera will underexpose the sky because the camera’s metering system can’t tell the difference between a bright sky and a scene with a lot of light that needs less exposure. It defaults to the scene with a lot of light and gives a bright scene less exposure than it should have. If your sky is bright and it’s starting to look dark in your image, add exposure (Figure 6.7). You can add exposure by using the plus compensation on your compensation control; if you’re shooting manual, increase your shutter speed.
ISO 100
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L a n d s c a p e p h o t o g r a p h y : F r o m s n a p s h o t s t o g r e at s h o t sIf your camera has exposure highlight warnings, look for them to appear in clouds in the sky, and then give slightly less exposure until they disappear. However, it can be misleading if your LCD shows no highlight warnings at all because that may mean that you don’t have enough exposure. Both a severely underexposed image and an image almost at the right exposure, for example, will not show highlight warnings, yet only one of these will give a good exposure for the landscape.
Unfortunately, there are scenes that are impossible to photograph with the right exposure. There is no right exposure because the range of brightness is beyond what the camera is capable of. Sometimes you can use high-dynamic range (HDR) photography to handle these conditions (see Chapter 9), but that doesn’t always work. Sometimes you just have to look for a different composition.
One reason pros shoot early and late in the day is to deal with this challenge. Early and late times include moments when the sky and ground balance out in certain directions, but you have to be aware of this and look for it.
Still, sunrise and sunset bring unique challenges for exposure. When you’re shooting toward the sun in these conditions, it’s impossible to expose for both the sky and the ground at the same time (unless you’re shooting HDR). Your best bet is to expose for the sky to be sure that it looks good, and then find something in the landscape that can be used as a silhouette against the sky (Figure 6.8). This doesn’t mean that your landscape has to fill the image with the silhouette. You can emphasize the sunrise or sunset sky and just use a little bit of the landscape to give the photograph a sense of place.
Having the sun in the sky can be dramatic and interesting, but the bright light of the sun can overinfluence your camera’s metering system so that you don’t get the right exposure. You need to increase the exposure from what the meter wants to give to the sky with sun in it—but exactly how much will depend entirely on the sky and the conditions. You can try metering the sky without the sun and using that exposure with a manual setting. Sometimes the best thing is just to take a series of photo-graphs, changing your exposure each time so that you have a variety of images to select from when you get back to the computer.
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ISO 100 1/350 sec.
f/5.6 165mm (Four Thirds)
the graduated neutraL-density FiLter
The graduated neutral-density filter was very popular with landscape photographers back in the 1990s. This filter is half-clear and half-dark, with a gradient through the middle to blend the two areas. A photographer would use this filter by putting the dark area over the sky and the clear area over the landscape, which would help balance the exposure of bright sky with the ground.
This filter is still a useful tool for photographers. The challenge is that not all landscapes look good with it. Because there is essentially a line through the middle of the filter where it changes from clear to dark, it also puts a line between the areas affected by the filter and the areas unaffected by the filter. Not all landscapes have that clean a division between sky and ground. For example, it can look odd to have a mountain starting to appear darker halfway up the slope.
I used to use this filter all the time, but today I use it much less. I know that there are things that I can do in the computer to control and balance the brightness of sky and ground if I’ve done my exposure homework correctly when taking the picture.
FIgure 6.8
The palm trees are not a large part of this sunset landscape, but they definitely tell you this is a Florida location.
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