[marc121]

Hello everyone, I am new to this forum and photography in general. I bought my first DSLR 2 months ago (K-50) and done few photos with it but my first real test came two weeks ago during my uncle's wedding.


We took wedding pictures outside on a beautiful clear day. The official photograph decided to take the shoot under a tree's shade. I had thought it went well and the pictures would be amazing but once I got the pictures on my computer to review them I was horrified to see that the sky looks as though it was a cloudy day! I had the same surprise when I took a picture from Inside the church towards the exit door. It almost looks like there was smoke coming from a fire outside! What I have done worng? How can I prevent this from happening next time? Can I fix that with a photo editor?


Thank you so much for your help


Marc A. Gendreau

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[tuco]

Well, there is a limit to the amount of light a digital camera can capture with detail. You have experienced those limits.

Things you can do to improve the situation next time is expose guarding the highlights and pull up your shadows in the RAW editor. With the sensor in the K-50, I believe, there is pretty good latitude in the low values to do that. But that might only get you up to a few stops more of light. If you pull the shadows up too far, you get color shifts and noise. You'll have to learn the limit by trial and error.

So for situations where you need to capture even more stops of light you need to exposure blend or use HDR software. That is, take multiple shots at different exposures. Now what could have also been done to prevent that problem in the case of the portrait is to avoid the sky in the picture all together.

[6BQ5]

+1.

The light in the composition exceeded the dynamic range of the camera's sensor. Your image shows correct exposure for your uncle at the expense of the shy. Exposing for the sky would have made your uncle too dark.

HDR is one possible solution. The built in HDR is decent.

You could also use a flash. Expose for the sky. That will make your uncle look dark. Make up for the difference using a flash to brighten him back up.

Lastly, recompose. Shoot from a different angle. Go portrait and zoom in for a bust shot with a 3/4 turn. You may look a little weird dancing around the area looking for the right angle but it will get you what you need.

I don't think you can recover the lost highlight color of the sky. The data is railed at the maximum. Bringing it down will just make it look grey - not blue.

[TER-OR]

These are pretty tough situations - your uncle's picture as mentioned above would have benefitted from a fill flash. The church? You're pretty well screwed there, that's a very bright patch in a dark area. You might be surprised, though, if you metered on the light doorway the rest of the image would be very dark - if not nearly black. If you're shooting RAW, you can likely recover all the "shadow" in your post-process program like Lightroom.

Take the chance and play with these images anyway - you'll learn how the programs work. You might be able to bump the shadows and reduce the highlights and get something pretty usable.

[Adam]

The best thing to do is to shoot in raw/raw+. That will allow you to make the biggest possible compensations when it comes to shadows/highlights, since raw files store a lot more image data than jpegs.

Sometimes even that's not enough, however. That's where bracketing comes it handy. Have the camera shot at 0, -0.5, and -1 EV and you should always have a photo that's recoverable or mergable with the main image.

[normhead]

The first mistake for the inside images was to shoot at 1600 ISO. The way digital works is as you increase your ISO, you decrease your dynamic range. You shot at 1600 and 1/40. 100 and 1/10 would have worked, even hand held with SR on and maybe saved some of that blown out detail, but not all. The best thing in that situation would shave been close the doors, or take two exposures, the one at 100 ISO and the exact same photo taken at -3 or -4 EV, then cut and paste the first into the second. A tripod is recommended for both these things.

In the second one once again you are not set to base ISO even though you are outdoors. Your ƒ stop selection at ƒ8 for this shot is wrong. For a 40mm lens and APS-c you could have gone to ƒ2.8 and maybe improved your back ground, but at most ƒ4, then you needed to move him so he didn't have a high light in the middle of his forehead, and possibly used your built in flash for a fill light. This kind of images is the reason wedding photographers want to have a larger sensor camera with a fast lens. They would create subject isolation from the background with narrow DoF, and a heavily blurred back ground. Your image of your uncle? simply looks cluttered.

So don' feel to bad, you did everything wrong, so you have lots of room to improve.

Wrong ISO, wrong ƒ stop, bad lighting, it was all working against you.

I would have backed up, so my flash was just beyond it's rated range, so it would act as a fill light not a main light, hopefully used a longer lens, taken in less of the background. An FA 77 1.8 probably would have nailed this shot wide open. Don't want to blow a wad, on an FA 77, the DA 50 1,7 is less than two hundred bukcs, and would have given you a fighting chance. But sometimes you just have to break down and say, an FF and an 85 1.4 and this shot would have rocked.

Most of the time it's about technique not equipment, for this shot, it's partly about equipment for the best possible result, along with all those other things.

[TER-OR]

If you crop the Uncle image just above his head, you remove most of the distracting sky.

And yeah, experienced portrait and event photographers would remove most of the problems by managing subjects and photographic opportunities - that's why the good ones cost, and why you should follow their instructions.

[Tanzer]

As others have noted, the problem you just experienced was the limitation of digital photography, although it affects all photography to some extent. The human eye and brain automatically adjust for dynamic range which masks the problem, whereas a photograph, particularly one taken with currently available digital sensors, will make it more obvious. It's like taking a picture of someone while they blink, you can't do much about it after the fact, so you need to try to avoid the problem somehow. Or, to compensate for it by avoiding the harsh dynamic ranges in sun and shade.

As Norm pointed out, larger sensors have some advantages with respect to dynamic range, but don't entirely eliminate the problem. And probably not to the extent that having a larger sensor would have been worth it.

Nothing wrong with the K-50 for the photo enthusiast. Going forward, as others have suggested, your best bet would be to shoot in RAW+JPEG, so you can post-process the tough ones. The only downside to shooting in RAW+JPEG is that SD card space is used up more quickly, and you might exhaust your burst rate buffer faster. Neither of these is a big problem. And as others have suggested, learning to use the camera's exposure bracketing feature to combine photos after the fact will work beautifully. This means you will need to do some processing outside of the camera, on your computer.

[normhead]

larger sensors have some advantages with respect to dynamic range,

Well no, the k-50 will beat a lot of sensors for dynamic range, FF and others, if you use it at base ISO (100). The FF thing with the 85 1.4 was to create narrower DoF to turn that messy background into bokeh,

[marc121]

Thank you all so much for your comments and advice! I look foward to working my photography skills!