An outdoor sanctuary

[gsmx2]

I'll reshoot this some day when the sun doesn't wash out the white rock wall, but other than that, do you have any suggestions? Thanks to feed back received on this forum, I shot this in raw and adjusted it to the best of my ability.
http://home.earthlink.net/~gsmx2/weblog/images/sanctuary.jpg

Scott

[slejhamer]

Hi Scott,

If you use a tripod, for high contrast scenes like this you might find it useful to bracket exposures so that you have one shot exposed for the highlights and one for the shadows. Then you can blend the two using layers in Photoshop to get something a bit less harsh.

Since you shot RAW, you might be able to squeeze a little extra detail from those highlights by using negative exposure comp in your RAW processor (the gamma control in BB, or the EC control in C1.) Then output two files as above, one for the shadows and one for the highlights, and blend in PS.

I like the idea of what you have captured here; it has very good potential. High-contrast scenes like this are difficult for digital cameras though, unless you do a work-around. (Alternatively you could walk around with a big scrim and diffuse the light when you are at the scene, but that's not too practical... :lol: )

[gsmx2]

slejhamer,

Thanks for the suggestion. This was shot with a tripod and although I autobracketted -1 to +1, it was enough to save the washout. It hadn't occurred to me to blend two different photographs.

New challenges await.

Scott

[slejhamer]

If you use Photoshop, you might find this action helpful - it does the blending for you.

http://www.outdooreyes.com/photo80.php3

Just open up the dark and light versions of the pic, press play and follow the prompts.

Enjoy!