7 Ways to Handle High Contrast Scenes ~ Jim Hamel

Perhaps the greatest challenge you will face in outdoor photography is the high contrast created by the sun and the bright sky versus a darker foreground. That is one of the reason photographers try very hard to shoot at dawn or sunset. Otherwise, the sky is virtually always so much brighter than anything on the ground that it is hard for your camera to deal with the contrast. Either your camera exposes the sky correctly, which makes everything on the ground look black, or the camera exposes the foreground correctly resulting in a blown out (or pure white) sky. If you try to expose in the middle, you will have problems with both highlights and shadows. Photoshop Users Read More…