Autopilot and Sunsets

My wife has a great little Sony Cyber-shot which she wanted because it was small and cute and fits easily in her purse. In fact that little sucker is a 13.6 mega pixel camera with a Carl Zeiss lense, but none of that is impressive or especially interesting to her. She doesn't want to know how or why to set the aperature or shutter speed for the right exposure. She just wants to pull it out of her purse and put it on "Program" and shoot the picture....its just that simple. Then she asks when she takes a picture of a sunset, why did my picture turn out so ugly....this camera is worthless she cries!

Well for those of you that are into Program mode only photography at least take this small advice to greatly improve your sunset shots. When you see that beautiful orange sunset over the mountain top and you are just admiring the beauty of it all, put your camera on program mode and instead of pointing it at the sunset scene, point it up in the sky above the orange sunset and push the button half way down to set the exposure and while you are holding the button part way down locking in the exposure settings, lower the camera to show the mountain with the sunset and when composed the way you like it, continue to push the button the rest of the way down to take the image.

Wa La...what a beautiful image with brilliant colors that just jump off the page. So you ask why did that make such a difference? Well the camera's computer sees that bright light in the picture so it shuts down the lens to let less light in so when you take the picture you see the mountains or landscape but the highlights are blown out. If you meter only on the sky then it will have the correct exposure for the sky so that when you lower the camera the sunset will come out great but the rest of the scene will be dark or a silhouette type image. Since the sunset is what you want to capture, you need to meter on the sky rather than the landscape.

Photography is very simple. Its all about the light and do you want to see the shadows or the highlights of the scene, or maybe both. Sometimes you have to choose which is more important as to what it is you are trying to capture in your image. If you expose for the shadows so you see the detail in the darker part of the image, you may have the highlights blown out, and this is something you can't fix in photoshop or with your printing lab. Your picture is just going to be a disaster! If you expose for the highlights, then you won't have blown out pictures, but they maybe darker than you want in the shadows, where you don't see much detail. That's why you have to start thinking about taking it off "Program" to give you some flexibility to get better quality photos. We will talk about how to do this more in future blogs.

Enjoy chasing the light....that's what it is all about!