are blown out skies acceptable sometimes?

[link]

<p>Danzel,<br>

A question: Did you shoot RAW or JPEG? You might recover some sky if you shot RAW...</p>

<p>Second, you could have had much less sky in the photo if you had stood up, (I'm assuming you are or "normal adult" height) instead of crouching down and shooting up into the sky.</p>

<p>If you and your client like the shot, it's fine. It's only one out of hundreds I assume and a bright cloudy day is always going to give whitish skies anyway.</p>

[William Michael]

<p>My guess is that the children are making their way down a slight incline, hence the up angle of the lens: but because I like guessing games, I would like to know the answer.</p>

<p>WW</p>

[fotografz]

<p>Danzel, sometimes a blown sky is part of life. A white haze sky is a lot brighter than most people think, and even when you try to balance it out with the foreground subject using fill flash they still go all or partially blank because it's ... well... bright white ... often way brighter than anything else in the scene.</p>

<p>My suggestion for your image is to add just a very slight dull blue tone to the top portion of your shot. If you observe the sky, it usually goes from a deeper tone to almost white at the horizon. Just slightly mimick Mother nature so you have a light tone holding the top edge of the photo.</p>

<p>Also, when shooting like this you often get a slight haze over the portions of the subject matter toward the top of the frame. To correct this just add some contrast to your image before adding in the slight sky tone so it looks a bit more natural to the eye.</p>

<p>Here's quick adjustment to your little web jpg, but you'll get the idea I think.</p>

<p>-Marc</p>

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[manuel barrera houston,]

<p>Dang all those times when all I had were gray skies and I kept trying to get blue skies on my images.</p>

[danzel_c]

<p>i appreciate all the additional responses! and thanks for all the compliments on the photo! apologize for my late reply but i didn't get much computer time yesterday. there are a lot of interesting things here to think about. the sky wasn't that flattering at all from this angle. it wasn't that blue to begin with and had some scattered clouds. maybe just a slight blue gradient as mark added but i can't remember exactly. this was late afternoon (about 4 or 5pm) and the sun was low and to the right as nadine picked up on. john - i wanted a high shutter speed because they were moving fast. but i probably could have took a few test shots at the sync speed with flash just to see. and the FL was 100. this image is actually cropped a little from the original. i have the 85/1.8, but i'm loving the 70-200 right now. the need for fill flash and my distance is a thing to keep in mind though. but i picked my distance so i could get two shots from one spot, one outside the canpoy, and one under the canopy where the guest were seated. i did shoot raw so i wasn't too worried about not being able to salvage the sky a little. dave thanks for posting more examples. sometime there just is no blue sky and you have to live with it, or sometimes there's a trade off it sounds like. william - you are correct, they are walking down an incline so i had to get low to get faces.</p>

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[picturesque]

<p>If the sky wasn't a pretty strong blue already, there isn't much you could do to make it blue--again, short of blasting with flash (impossible at your subject distance with shoemounts). If the sky was white-ish with clouds, you'd pretty much have to underexpose everything else <strong>a lot</strong> to get even a small amount of detail in the sky.</p>

<p>Just for fun, check your other images from the ceremony, where you maybe had better luck balancing with flash?. That will tell you what the sky actually was like at the time.</p>

[arie_vandervelden1]

<p>FWIW, I think this photo would look great in B&W or sepia.</p>