How to avoid overexposed sky?

Hey, I have recently been taking a lot of outdoor photographs and I notice the sky is usually way to over exposed or worse the light from the sky is coming infront of the subject. I'm a fairly new photographer and wanted to know how to avoid this. By the way, I use a 50mm 1.8 lens on a 60D body.

Expose for the sky and use some fill flash. This link will be helpful also http://www.strobist.bl​ogspot.com/

Great shot BTW

you could try a polarizing filter or not taking portrait photos when lighting conditions are so adverse.

If you want to properly expose the sky, you'll need a fill flash to properly expose your subject. I often will use the sun as a backlight and fill with flash to get a better exposure on the face/front of the subject.

This is a not great example since I used just the on camera flash and the sun was a little more left of camera than directly behind, but it worked out ok. I probably increased the fill light in post processing using LR3 as well. But, you can see that his dark shirt is still under exposed at the bottom.

This shot looks to me as if you have a little sun flare as evidenced by a slight "mistiness" or lack of contrast. That should be correctable in PP.

However, your original question is a broad subject, but it relates to the dynamic range of your camera. Dynamic range is simply the range between light and dark which your camera can reproduce. It is far less than the human eye eo you have to take steps to reduce it. In this case, I would have used the exposure compensation to reduce overall exposure by a stop or two. That may be enough to retain a bit of sky detail. Alternatively with a close, backlit image, you could use fill in flash from the camera to light the subject, whilst setting your camera to expose for the sky.

Another technique I use is to take a meter reading from the sky and then use exposure lock whilst re-composing. This takes a bit of practice to know exactly how much sky to include in your meter reading.

Hope this helps.

Make sure the sky is properly exposed (increase SS, reduce aperture, lower ISO, use a ND filter) and use a flash to light your subject.

Assuming you don't want to post process at all, underexposing and adding some flash would work. You could add a graduated neutral density filter, but in some instances like this photo, you would have part of your subject's head in the filtered portion.
If you do want to post process then basically you'd make a simple HDR photo by taking two exposures and compositing them. Don't let anyone tell you HDR is a bad word. Like anything, it's only bad if over done.

Oh and nice photo by the way. Great expression on his face.

Try this:
http://daystarvisions.​com/Docs/Tuts/DCExp/pg​1.html

Using a fast lens at wide apertures may result in a shutter speed faster than your camera can sync with the flash, you can use HSS which will use more flash power or buy a Neutral Density filter to bring down you shutter speed.

Some links that may help

Expose for the Sky - HSS

HSS V's ND Filter

Some other ideas that aren't so "light" focused.

Compose a tighter shot so the sky isn't such a large part of the back ground. Maybe change the angle as well so you're not shooting up or at, but more down.

I really like the expression. But if you want some criticism, you could have moved a little in either direction just to get rid of the pole in the back ground (kind of growing out of his head). But really nice bokeh, really sharp and great expression. Great work for being "fairly new"

Here I thought the best way was to shoot the scene without the person in it, then shoot the person against a white or black background and then superimpose?

Probably explains why I get crummy results like this hack job!

Expose for the sky, then push the fill light 800%...

^^Joking by the way.

LOL. Then complain when the new 5d3 can't handle that without noise.