Civil War Yank Drummer

This was a bright sunny day. As you can see on his left side of the

beard it go washed out from the sun. Could I have prevented this

with using the correct settings on the camera? Or is there just not

much you can do.

This wasn't posed, he was standing in a formation, so I couldn't ask

him to move into the shade.

I made it grainy to make it look like an older picture.

yes, absolutely.

Assuming you were shooting digital, you should watch the histogram on the read of the camera for spikes against the right margin.

There are a couple of ways to fix this. (This is a great reason to shoot raw which had more dynamic range)

• Use exposure compensation to force the exposure down. You will them have to 'correct' the rest of the pictures underexposure in the editing
• Shoot two exposure; one 'normal' and one a stop or so underexpose to get the beard and blend the two (this is difficult on a movable target)

If this explanation sounds like gobbledygook send me a message and I'll direct you to some reading materials.

This is not a great BW conversion because much of the image is rather flat in tone.

Best regards

PDE

Yeah, this is tough metering and under the conditions I don't know how you could have done any better.  I would imagine the beard was washed out even with your naked eye.  In some cases I will clone some adjacent color (at about 10-15% opacity) into hot spots, but in this case the spot is too large and it didn't look right.  I'd say just leave it as is and go for the vintage look.  I did take your image and adjust the light levels a tad, added some contrast and cropped it to (hopefully) add some depth.  See what you think of the attached example.  All done with PhotoShop Elements 11. 

Regardless, a well captured character... Mike

HI David,

There are a few things you could have tried.  The biggest thing most people forget (myself included) is that you can use a flash, even in bright daylight.  What you're trying to do is balance the brightness and believe it or not a close up flash CAN compete with the sun.  The second thing is that (assuming you have prepared and maybe have a spare set of hands) is use a reflective surface, such as a white board...however, the smaller the card and the further away you are, the less effective that'll be.  When shooting people, HDR and bracketing don't do well (doesn't look natural and i don't car how quick you are, people move between shots), but if you were shooting an inanimate object, THAT would be my preferred method. 

Quick tip:  one thing that helped me is shooting manual mode.  Green grass is really close to middle grey, so if you pre-expose for grass and set that to manual, you'll be shooting for ambient light exposure rather than trying to find the right metering spot on the subject.  For the shot above, however, i would have spot metered his beard to avoid the over exposure.

--PatrickD