Saturday, November 5, 2011

Backlighting

(Annette made my day,  so I'm back tonight.  I'm easy like that.)

This is a backlit photo of Lucy taken around 430 this afternoon.  It's SOOC (straight out of camera with zero editing.)

Pretty girl, and she does not look like she's been coughing nonstop for a week.

Here's the technical data:
Nikon D300s
Nikkor 18-200 mm lens 
Focal length 70 mm
1/80
f/5.0
ISO 500
My understanding is that for crispness, technically,  my shutter speed should have been at least 100 with a 70 mm focal length,  but I can't take the noise of a higher ISO.  That's not crispy.  It's noisy.  Also,  I was using my Polarizing filter because I read that it might help in sunny hazy situations. I don't know if it helped.  Plenty of the other shots had much more haze.  I don't have a hood for this lens.  I was blocking the glare with my hand.

So, when I'm getting ready to take a picture like this I'm making sure that I'm metering off her face, but I'm going to set it to under-expose a pinch so that there aren't a ton of blown highlights. If you over-expose a photo, even in camera RAW format, you are capturing sections of the photo that have zero detail. Nothing but white.  Look at the bright part of Lucy's hair.  Blown out.  No matter how closely I zoom in,  I can't see strands of hair.

In this shot I used a very slight fill flash so that her face wouldn't be totally and completely under-exposed.  We were in the woods.  Sure,  there was sunlight,  but I'm still pretty surprised by just how much light you need in a setting like this.  That reminds me.  I was supposed to try my 50mm with this today.  Ooops.  Maybe tomorrow.

So,  I popped the open Photoshop and did some popping.  Brightened her face a touch,  reduced the red in her face, warmed up the haze, sharpened the eyes a bit and here is the final image:




 Once more-  the before and after:








1 comment:

  1. When you wrote: 'here's the technical data' I honestly expected to hear about the coughing. (Yeah, I'm that tired.)

    Beautiful.

    ReplyDelete