At 6:20 PM -0700 9/23/06, kodiakimages wrote:
I live on Vancouver Island, Canada (Victoria specifically) If you
ever decide to venture out this way drop me and email beforehand and
I'll set up a few photo excursions in my favorite places.
Some day I'll get out there again. The closest I've been able to get
in the last 10 years is Humboldt Redwoods, where, basically, the same
problem obtains.
Some remedies you might try to achieve proper exposures include:
1) use a color or black and white target and meter off the card. I'm
assuming you have the ability to review your digital images
immediately after making the exposure;
I have no problem obtaining a usable RAW exposure, what I'm curious
about is just which tools people have been using most successfully to
adjust the result, and in what manner. Although it's clear to me
that underexposure is a good general procedure with digital capture,
and perhaps my results on this particular shoot would have benefitted
from even more that I applied (2/3 stop), I still have hotspots
scattered all over the forest floor.
2) set your white balance as per user instructions for your camera;
I shoot RAW in order to avoid messing with white balance set in the
camera. RAW allows one to adjust the color temperature as well as
all the color channels if they are badly off. In addition, the Canon
10D's native representation of color differs from that of the Nikon
D100, which I experimented with early on, in that it does not suffer
from an excess of blue. My colors nearly always need contrast and
saturation but not RGB adjustment.
As for sky, I fancy one would have to plant some fill flash way in
the trees to counteract the contrast if one included sky! Having no
sling, nor someone to pull it up, I gave up on including sky until
some future time when I'm rich and can afford an assistant!
The two exposure solution is generally not workable because of the
wind's effect on the tops of the trees, although in the days when one
could do multiple exposures on a single piece of film (surely less
time consuming than combining frames digitally) the motion in the
tops of the trees made an interesting visual effect! But the wind
did not allow for sufficient depth of field, since a small f stop
requires a long exposure (or upping the ISO which makes a very grainy
(noisy) result).
In this particular situation I discovered once again that the tree
trunks move as well as the cinnamon ferns covering the floor of the
forest, so some of the shots were simply completely unsharp despite a
tripod. I really didn't want to settle for the distance being
unsharp, and certainly didn't want the ferns in the foreground
unsharp, so was left with a very long exposure.
So perhaps that brings it down to exposing for the highlights and
dodging the 90% which is not highlights up to balance?
Oh dear, there must be another way. Just masking the highlights
would be a nightmare...
--
Emily L. Ferguson
mailto:elf@xxxxxxxx
508-563-6822
New England landscapes, wooden boats and races
http://www.vsu.cape.com/~elf/
http://e-and-s.instaproofs.com/
