Capped Cats

Mostly a fun shot. The snow caps looking like stocking caps resting on these

cattails. Highlights are blownout and if anyone has suggestions for fixing/

minimizing that problem (post exposure) I would appreciate your comments.

I don't wear stockings so I wouldn't know. :-)

Blown highlights, if not too severe and limited to one color, might be recoverable if you shoot RAW. It works by RGB channel splitting and using the un-blown luminosity to substitute blown areas. Google "Bibble Pro" for more.

You're generally SOL if whites (all three colors) are blown.:-)

John, here's an example of recovered highlight. I shot her running under full sun (difficult to meter), fortunately the blown area was restricted to the Red channel.

And here's an enlargement of the recovered area.

Nice job on recovering a blown-out area. I will try top remember to check the different channels. In this case all three channels were blown out (SOL situation). Here I pulled the black level nearly to the white level to highlight the blown out areas. I did check the three channels as well, but all were blown out. I should probably look through my photos and see if I took varying exposures of the cattails, I almost always do in any situation that I believe the meter could be fooled.

John

We should compare camera settings some time. It took me better part of the first year to fully understand each custom setting parameter, made more complicated by the need to adapt shooting style with each change. If you haven't explored the CSM in detail, John, Ken Rockwell has a pretty good summary:

http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d70/d70-settings-menus-shooting.htm

http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d70perf.htm#performance

In this case, I think metering the brightest spot might have reduced sensor saturation but the high reflectance of fresh snow would likely have resulted in blown areas, regardless, given the apparent direct bright sun.

I probably should have used a polarisor to reduce the reflectiveness. In snow or anything else that is white I add 1.5 to 2 stops so that I don't end up with grey snow. The shadows on the snow are fairly short, so I took this when the light was too bright to get a great image.

I will check out Mr. Rockwell's site as well.

John