I understand and agree with ss44's comment about the washed out sky in the "chalk cliff" image.
This is a good example of the difficulty in photographing a landscape in bright summer sun.
The sky is very much brighter than the ground.......there is something like a three stop difference between the two and that
is way out of the dynamic range of the film and/or sensor so that the camera cannot give an ideal exposure value for both
land and sky at the same time.
The camera will try and either decide which is the predominant tonal value,( or will try to average them out and come up
with a horrible looking compromise)
You then get (if you expose for the ground) nice ground but washed out sky, or (if you expose for the sky) a good sky but
with a dark and underexposed ground..
What to do..?
Well if you have a darkroom and are using film, then a bit of dodging and burning during printing will go a long way to help,
or if you are shooting digitally, then some fiddling in Photoshop may just help and may just rescue the image.
However, the best way is to do as much "in camera" as you can ( the more you can do in camera the less you have to do in
Photoshop..always the best option) to try and reduce the brightness contrast and bring the two within the same dynamic
range.
The best way to do this is to spend some money and get yourself a set of high quality ND Grad filters to attach to the front
of the lens. Neutral Density Graduated Filter.
Set in a holder screwed into the filter thread on the lens, these filters can be rotated and adjusted vertically which allows
you to lay a suitable grey "screen" over the sky and align the gradations along the horizon.
Good quality are Lee ( expensive ) or Hitech ( not so pricey but still very good).....avoid the cheapo Jessops and Cockin ones
they tend to put a purple cast over the image.
If you don't want to spend money on filters....there is a free method of improving the situation if you are using
digital..although it does mean more work in Photoshop.
That is.............expose for the brighter areas in the image, meaning the sky and not the ground even if the ground is the
larger area in the frame.
Get the sky right and let the ground go hang........You will get a perfectly exposed sky but a very underexposed ground..
then into Photoshop where dodging in dark/underexposed areas will always give a better result than trying to burn out
overexposed areas. Indeed, if the overexposure in a digital image is extreme there may be no data at all..no pixels to
adjust.
There now...TD's Rant of the Day
