Friday, January 21, 2011

Outdoor Shoot

Its such a pain to have a photoshoot in wide open spaces during a cloudy day. When you happen to have a particular setting under the shadow of a cloud , then suddenly the cloud moves about, causing the sun's intense rays to change the lighting of your subject. You have to adjust your settings again to suit the new lighting condition in order to compensate. You can always adjust the brightness and gamma levels of your photo afterwards if it is too dark, but its harder to compensate for a shot which is too bright because the light tends to burn out the details of the subject, which can never be recovered even after a lot of brightness and contrast corrections.

In such cases, you can use reflectors to focus the needed light on your subject, specially if there is a lot of ambient light against the lens to begin with. Either that or use your flash while lowering your ISO and shutter speed. In the bright December noon sun, I found it best to set your ISO around 200 or 400, with a shutter speed of 1/40, 1/60 or 1/30. Adding a flash might need a shutter speed of 1/800 or more.

(taken at Paradizoo, Tagaytay using a Canon D1000 set to f5.6, 1/800, ISO400. Bubbles courtesy of my son and my goddaughter)

No comments:

Post a Comment