 Steven Chaitoff |
Overexposed sky I took this picture when I was in Guatemala & like numerous others I have, the sky is disgustingly bland, white & unsatisfactory. The jungle is so dark that on all of my shots like this, the sky is overexposed and is makes for an ugly, unuseable picture. Any suggestions to fix this for when I go back? My own thinking is that a polarizer won't help because this is an exposure problem. I've never used a graded ND filter but I don't think it'll work well because there's no straight horizon. Even with a straight on shot of the horizon, unlike this one, the tree line is quite uneven. -Steven
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Steven Chaitoff |
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Damian P. Gadal |
What time of day are you shooting?
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Steven Chaitoff |
You know I can't tell you...I was shooting at all different times from about 9 AM 'till 6 PM. Just objectively, this one in particular looks like early afternoon, maybe 1 PM. Anyway, many many of my shots have this washed out the sky -- it's not exclusory to a specific time period.
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Bob Cammarata |
What color was the sky to the naked eye? I'm guessing that in the Central American jungle in summertime, clear blue skys are rare. If you do happen upon a deep blue sky and want to capture the color, shoot with the sun behind you and meter off the sky itself. The sunlight illuminating the foreground landscape should be close in intensity to the light reflecting off the distant sky. In this scenario, your sky will be rendered blue and the landscape should look pretty close to normal as well. If you encounter a ligh-blue or gray sky obscured by clouds and haze, there is little you can do during mid-day to keep it from washing out. In this case, it's best to not include ANY sky in the composition and concentrate more on just the landscape. You could also limit your shooting times to sunrise and sunset, when the light is "warmer" and adds natural color to the sky.
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Steven Chaitoff |
No, the sky certainly isn't a deep blue, but there are virtually no clouds & it does have a normal bluish tint. If you meter off the sky itself, then recompose on the landscape, I would think the jungle would come out dark. I mean even in that lousy picture above there's a pretty large loss of color info. right in the middle of the jungle. Anyways, I think that is what you have to do to achieve that blue in the sky. What would be great is just a reduction in contrast between the two brightness levels -- or just cut out the sky like you say.
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Pamela K |
I've never used one myself, but my grandfather had a gradated warming filter that caused half of the picture to be warmer than the other. Something like this might help if you wanted to grade from a warm sky to the darker green of the jungle. This would cut the contrast between the two. Here's a website with info on gradated filters: Hope this helps. Pam
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Alix Nublado |
Maybe the sky just wasn't your fault. But filters could help.
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anonymous A. |
Grad filters ARE the answer. Because they are graduated, there is no obvious line between the dark and clear areas; the sky just merges naturally with the land/trees/ mountains. Get the square Cokin style; you can slide them up and down to match the horizon line. For the images you already have, there are three options: use software to replace the sky with one from another photo; selectively increase the contrast or reduce the lightness in the sky area; use a simulated graduated filter on the image. This is the easiest fix...Download Picassa from Google (free) and use whatever coloured grad filter you want, at whatever angle, and adjust the fade and horizon line to suit.
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