Exposure compensation for hard light at beach

[Mike D]

I shot some digital images with a D2H at a surf contest in Lower

Trestles last weekend and the images taken after 9:30 in the morning

were virtually destroyed by the hard lighting from the bright sun. I

used the matrix metering with no exposure compensation because I use a

polarizing filter but this didn't seem to help. Is there a different

way to meter the situation to produce a better exposure?

[Jerry_]

Yes...for film, meter your arm with a small spot meter in the camera. This will give you a starting point: then bracket your exposures. You should have been able to review a few shots on your LCD, no? Generally, matrix metering at the beach gives super silhouettes if the sun is not behind you.

[macgregor_anderson]

What was wrong with the images? Blown highlights?

 

Mac

[Mike D]

Towards the middle of the day, the surfer's skin becomes very dark and needs a lot of selective lightening in Photoshop. The LCD is very difficult to see at the beach. In retrospect, I like the idea of exposing for my arm and then perhaps under exposing 1.5 stops similar to images taken in the snow. I am looking for recommendations from surf photographers who have been able to solve this problem.

[macgregor_anderson]

I'm not a surf photographer, but I did grow up in California, so I'm semi-qualified.

 

If you find that after you've metered skin and set exposure comp to minus 1.5 that you have surfers looking a couple stops underexposed and that you need to selectively lighten them later, and that maybe you've still got some blown highlights too, you might try asking wedding photographers, and people who take pics of their kids at the beach, and people who take digital pics in high contrast situations in general. I think the problem is fairly common. Not limited to surfing scenes.

 

Bottom line, of course, is to protect the highlights you care even slightly about, hope your sensor has the latitude to pick up detail in what becomes "shadows", and post process carefully.

 

Time saving ideas might include using an in camera curve or batch processing the files with a curve. Maybe even just using that photoshop tool for backlit scenes. I forget what it's called.

 

Or you could switch to black and white film. I get a good solid 12 stops or more out of the stuff. Negative color film might also give a bit more latitude than that sensor. But it will require a lot of processing time. Yours, or a labs.

 

Good luck!

 

Mac

[verdellnazgul]

Shooting in lighting conditions like that are difficult even for seasoned pros. You'll see guys bringing a truckload of gobos, gazeebos, and gizmos to try to control the light enough to get the beach look with a well exposed image. It can take a lot of work. And that's on the shore. You certainly can't cart all that stuff out to a surfer. So for beach stuff I shoot early in the moring or later in the evening for better lighting conditions. Or shoot film for more latitude. Shooting way under to prevent blown highlights and then bringing up the dark areas leads to mottled skin tones, no snappy colors, etc. Even with heavy PSing a lot of times it just looks like junk. If I do shoot in afternoon hours I'll try to keep the sky out of the shot as it's almost always going to be blown. Try to shoot down on the subject, say from a pier or bring a ladder.

 

Steve

[lex_jenkins]

Try a custom curve for your D2H. I've developed a couple for my D2H that helps with odd, contrasty lighting situations. One is specifically for use with flash. It bumps up the gamma a bit while compressing shadows and highlights a couple of points. Occasionally it's also useful in extremely contrast outdoor lighting.

 

There are tips throughout the web for this, including some pre-made curves that you can download free and try for yourself.

 

You'll need Nikon Capture with Camera Control to load these curves. (It's possible that some other software will work but Capture is all I've tried.)