Avoiding washout

Question

Using a Canon T3i, 18-55 kit lens, 18mm, 1/40 sec, F9, ISO 200 on a sunny afternoon I shot two people, shaded, in a cupola. They came out great, properly exposed. The sunny front bar of the cupola and the field in the background are washed out. Is there a way that I could have avoided the washout but kept the good view of the people in the shaded area? (I tried to upload the picture but the system was telling me that there was a problem because of framing and the shot could not be uploaded, I realize that the picture would have made it easier to advise) This might show the picture I'm referring to. It's the best I can do. https://www.flickr.com/photos/larryoldbridge/14484178634/

Answer 1

The different elements in the scene you describe have too wide of a dynamic range to be captured at the same time by your camera. The easiest solution is to add light to the darker elements so they are closer in brightness to the brighter elements. there are primarily two ways to do it:

• Fill flash The additional light falling on your subjects in the shade will raise the amount of light they are reflecting significantly. The same amount of light added to the brighter parts of the scene will be practically unmeasurable.

• Reflectors A reflector is especially effective if the subjects are back lit. By bouncing some of the ambient light from sources behind your subjects onto their fronts that are facing you you can raise the amount of light they are reflecting towards the camera.

In either case by increasing the amount of light your subjects are reflecting towards the camera you can reduce exposure to avoid blowing out the bright background without making your subjects too dark.

You can also salvage more of the image you shot in post processing if you saved it as a RAW file rather than a JPEG. The RAW file contains all of the dynamic range captured by the sensor, while a JPEG has already discarded much of it. By manipulating the light curves before exporting you can bring the highlights and shadows in the RAW file closer to each other.

Answer 2

Unless by "afternoon" you meant well into the evening, no, there is no way you could have gotten the whole scene well-exposed in a single image without adding light to your subjects in the shaded area.

A long-standing rule of thumb in photography is the "Sunny 16" rule: near midday on a sunny day, with an aperture of f/16, the shutter speed for a proper exposure will be about 1/ISO second. That would give 1/200s at f/16 as a ballpark figure for elements that were in the open sunlight. Your aperture was f/9, or 1-2/3 stops wider aperture, which means that your shutter speed would have to have been 1-2/3 stops faster, or 1/640s. Perhaps the sun wasn't quite so bright, so you might have been able to use, say, 1/400s or maybe even as slow as 1/250s. That's still a whole lot faster than 1/40s, meaning that there was a lot more light in the open sun than there was in the shade - by about 3 to 5 stops, depending on the conditions at the time. That is more difference than the camera can handle.

Since you can't turn down the light in the sunlit parts of the picture, your only alternative is to add light to what was in shade. Flash is the easiest way to do that, but since the amount of light you would be adding is significantly more than "fill light", you would need to take some steps to keep it from looking like hard on-camera flash. If all you have to work with is the pop-up flash, then you'd have to settle for a picture that looks like you've used the pop-up flash if the subjects remain deep in the shade.

You can improve that quite a bit by moving your subjects closer to the edge of the shade, giving them more indirect light from the sky. You would still have to use the flash to balance the exposure of your subjects with the exposure of the foreground and background, but because the flash would be contributing far less (proportionally) to the lighting of your subjects, the resulting light will look a lot more natural. The flash will mostly be filling in shadows caused by the skylight, and the skylight will lend shape to your subjects. However, anything that remains deep in shade in the cupola would still be too dark. That can't be helped without off-camera lighting, and probably more than one flash unit at that.

(A reflector can also be useful, but from what you've described, you wouldn't be able to use a reflector effectively in this case. In order for the reflector not to appear in the picture, it would need to be a significant distance away from the subjects, so it would need to be enormous as well in order to adequately light the area and avoid too much fall-off.)

Answer 3

Yes, you probably could have exposed this picture to see the subjects well but not blow out the highlights. The trick is to expose to the brightest part of the image you care about (don't want to have blown out). The people in the shadow will then be quite dim, but should still have good enough intensity resolution with most modern cameras.

To make the final picture, you have to start with the raw file since you will need all the original sensor data. By applying non-linear brightness mapping, you should be able to make the subjects look bright enough, while making the background look brighter but not blown out.

Having part of a subject sunlit and other parts in the shade is a normal and common thing, and so are the methods of dealing with it.

Answer 4

Not sure if real answer. It's a technique a used with old P&S

You can set the camera in a fix position a took a shoot exposing for bright and another for subject. Then, in post, merge both shoot in one picture.