need help with bright spots

[reddyroc007]

i shot this with my 18-55 IS kit lens w/ a circ. polarizer. my problem is with the blown out areas to the right of the picture. is there anything i can do while capturing to avoid the blown out sky? any comments/tips greatly appreciated.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2034/3527161393_21341bcab7_b.jpg

[Radtech1]

Base on where the rays are coming from, that little break in the sky allows the viewer to pretty much look in the direction of the sun. That high of luminosity, compared to the rest of the shot, represents too large of a luminosity difference for a digital sensor (or film, for that matter) to handle. It is going to clip somewhere - either that smidgen of sky will be overexposed and the rest of the shot will be black (or nearly so), or you can take what you've got here. Raw MIGHT bring back some of the blown sky - by processing it twice and blending - but that is not "in camera" as you had asked.

But talking about THIS SHOT - given the converging rays, I thing that the brightness of the sky there is appropriate, given the context of the shot. If anything, I might zoom down to the pixel level and tone down some of the orange that rings the blown areas.

Rad

[dpark]

is there anything i can do while capturing to avoid the blown out sky? any comments/tips greatly appreciated.
Capture it twice (or more) at different exposures and merge, aka HDR. If your scene as a dynamic range that your camera cannot capture, then you are left with no option but to either clip or to resort to post-processing.

P.S. I like this image, though I agree the blown areas in the upper-right detract. I agree with Rad that smoothing the rings of orange would help a lot.

[reddyroc007]

thanks very much for the replies. i figured some post would be best to correct the area but wasnt sure if there was more i should be watching for while shooting. guess i've got a date with photoshop... thanks again :)