Deep Ardeche

How could I prevent the over exposition at the back on that picture

and, by the way, would it be better ???

 

Many thanks for your inputs

 

Stan

I think it would be better if the horizon would be defined well. Maybe some shade of grey would not do harm to the sky either, just to make you feel it's blue.

 

Since it is B/W, you have a full range of options. It depends also if the burnout is already on the negative or happened during printing. What you could do if the negative is already overexposed is A) a colour filter to reduce the sky intensity (orange?/green?) B) a graduated ND filter C) if you have a full roll of high-contrast shots, adjust the developping time (see http://www.photo.net/photo/tutorial/film)

 

If the negatives look good and you do the prints yourself, D) take a lower gradation paper and/or E) shadow the forest area (e.g. with your hands), while exposing the sky a little longer.

 

 

Using a ND filter should help bring out the background, then play with it a little in the darkroom. A question you should ask your self is what YOU want out of the shot. What did you see that made you want to take it? is it there? then work on getting in the picture what you wanted. Just my opinion.

When I encounter a backlit situation I often think

of a fill flash. This would help highlight the

cross while not overexposing the rest of the

picture.

The first thing you can do is to look at the negative to see how much detail is preserved in the sky. If there is, then using a combination of a lower contrast paper grade (or using the yellow filters if using VC papers) and burning might work. For future work you can do several things, already mentioned by others:1)use lens filters (green, yellow, orange, red, ND) 2)use fill-flash, which will illuminate the foreground 3) mess with reducing the developing time to reduce the overall contrast of the negative (That will affect all the pictures of the roll). Hope this helps.