Landscape photography (help required)

[pixeleye]

I've started to take landscape pictures. Some pictures turns out quite well but I keep having problems with clouds.

I took a picture where 80% was sky and the rest was forest and houses. The sky was mostly dark clouds with the sun behind (not direct sunlight against the camera). Even in some pictures the sky covered 60% of the picture with the same problems.

Problem?

Well the sky turns out OK, but the the rest is utterly dark. All the houses and trees got so dark that the pictures were a disappointment. How can I avoid this? How can I take a picture where I capture the sky without making the down part of the picture dark.

I know _something_ of photographing and I believe the problem might be that the sky is too bright and therefore the houses and the trees turn out dark. In other words too hight contrast.

This is still strange because the sky was not that bright and there shouldn't have been a problem. I know that filters might help, but I really need to know for someone who has more experience on why this happens and how to avoid this from happening.

Thanks for the help in advance!

Herman

[Jesper]

Herman, have you tried editing your images in Photoshop or another image editing program? If you carefully select the dark parts (the houses etc.) and make them lighter (you could use Levels or Curves in Photoshop), you might be able to get more detail out than you think.

High-contrast scenes are a bit of a problem with today's digital cameras, because the dynamic range of the sensor in most digital cameras is limited - it can't handle much more than 6 stops or so, just like slide film.

You can gain some dynamic range by shooting RAW if your camera supports it, converting the RAW images to 16-bit TIFFs on the computer and working with them in an image editing program that supports 16-bit editing (such as Photoshop CS or Picture Window Pro). With 16-bit images, you can stretch the contrast of dark parts more than with standard 8-bit per channel images before you start to see banding and other problems.

If you have a tripod, you can also make two photos of the same scene and combine them. A good tutorial on how to do this is given on Luminous Landscape: Understanding Digital Blending (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/digital-blending.shtml).

[vvizard]

Guess the last part of Jesper's post said it, but Exposure-bracketing might help. It let you take one correctly exposed shot, one underexposed, and an overexposed. Those can be combined in photoshop to give a shot correctly exposed in all areas.

[stopbath]

Don't forget, the sky is the light source, and the trees are only reflected light.

You're eyes have far better latitude for contrast than film or sensors, so what seems not too contrasty can easily wipe out a photographic image.

Expose for the highlights, and then either shoot another image for he shadows (trees) or use curves to boost the shadows.

If you have a spot meter on your camera, you can use that to evaluate the scene. Take a meter reading of the brightest section where you want texture. Note the exposure. Meter the deepest shadow or texture where you want texture. If the range is greater than 6 stops, the image is high contrast and should be modified to print well.