Bright sun, black statue, hard shadows

[Stephen Lutz]

I have been haunting local cemeteries lately, shooting statues and monuments. In an earlier post, I extolled the benefits of nice gray days with even lighting. Regrettably, not every day is good for photography. Yesterday, I had hard, bright light (around 2 PM) and a dark statue. There were shadows falling across the statue and the front was facing away from the sun. What to do? I started by shooting a full two stops under on the main meter, and one stop under on the flash. My idea was to not blow out the highlights, and still saturate the colors, while at the same time bringing out detail to the statue. I shot several photos at different settings and ended up with several that worked. This one was shot at -1 1/3 on the main meter and -1 on the flash.

My advice is use your digital camera's histogram and review LCD to check out variations. DON'T just rely on the meter, since it is "dumb" and is designed for average lighting.

[Photo-John]

The histogram is the best exposure tool invented since the light meter. It's actually digital camera bonus. I absolutely rely on it. In fact, I've been testing a compact camera that doesn't have a histogram, and I just don't get it. Why would any camera designer not include a histogram now?

Thanks for the tips, Steve. I hope some people find them useful.

[Stephen Lutz]

One of the things I like most about digital photography is that it gives me instant results in re: exposure settings. I don't have to wait to get the film back. I can experiment on the fly with combos of different settings. For my statue picture below, I wanted to get detail on the statue itself, but to do so without flash would mean overexposing the whole scene. Not good.

So, I underexposed (drastically) the overall scene, and added light (from the flash) on the subject (the statue). One thing people don't realize is that with flash in bright sun you essentially have two exposures. The overall scene and the subject.

In this instance, it didn't matter if the overall scene was underexposed, since the sun was so bright anyway. What mattered was exposure on the subject.

These sort of little puzzles are what makes digital photography much more enjoyable to me than film. I can actually find out right away what "works."

[Loupey]

Thanks for sharing your tips, Stephen.

The more tricks we have up our sleeves, the better (or at least more prepared) we all will be