Thanks to my grandmother-in-law's brand new computer, I am finally able to play around with some of the pictures I have taken over the last few weeks. Boy this is quite a learning experience! This quick photoshoot with my wife yesterday frustrated my new-found understanding of exposure quite a bit, and I am really having to learn how to see light differently. [Read More...]
We went out in early evening, a little shy of the golden hour because we had to go somewhere. My initial frustration came from trying to understand how to expose a face when your dealing with a lot of backlight. Because there wasn't much reflection on the ground in front of her, her face would either be too underexposed (causing her to have pretty dark eyes), or her shirt would get a little too blown out.
She wears makeup so her face is going to be darker than her arms (I mean we just returned from living in Ukraine for a year!), but maybe the lesson is more on the shirt she's wearing?
I guess why this frustrates me so much is that I see so many photographer's backlit photos in and around the golden hour, but the faces are perfectly exposed.
This photo was definitely one of the better ones, as far as being evenly-lit is concerned. I was pretty discouraged looking at these in Photoshop until I realized that my white balance was destroying the look I was going for. I guess this was my first lesson in why shooting in raw is so great, as I just slid the bar over and magically saw the picture take on the light I had expected to see. I guess the daylight/shade mix confused the white balance in the camera.
I did run a simple "color boosting" action on this, but I really kept all the layers at a minimum. Here's the before to compare:
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