selmslie Loc: Fernandina Beach, FL, USA

In Sunny 16 Rule I posted several images taken at the Saint Augustine Alligator Farm. I exposed all of them at ISO 400, about 1/800 @ f/11. This worked well for all of the images I captured during that visit, regardless of whether the background was the sky, shaded trees or water. A month earlier I had used the same approach at the 2017 Amelia Island Concours d'Elegance with two other cameras, one film and the other digital, also at ISO 400, about 1/800 @ f/11. All images were taken in broad daylight. For the B&W images I used ISO 400 film and a yellow filter so the exposure was 1/500 @ f/11.

Today I was looking unsuccessfully for some wildlife so instead I created some more examples. While they are not particularly artistic specimens they are all cases where no amount of fiddling in the camera with metering or exposure compensation would have produced exposures that were any more appropriate.

I used ISO 800 (there was some wind) and a shutter speed of 1/2000 or 1/1600 @ f/11. I applied no exposure adjustment (except as noted) and no highlight or shadow recovery. I made slight adjustments to the images using the curve and clarity tools in Capture One Pro. All of the images came out as I expected despite the differences in the background which would have caused the camera's meter some trouble.

1/2000 sec +1/3 stop exposure adjustment in PP

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1/1600 sec

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1/1600 sec

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1/1600 sec

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1/1600 sec

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1/1600 sec

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MikieLBS Loc: "Southeast of Disorder"

Very nice. I noticed you are shooting at sunlit leaves into a dark background with the sun at your back. Too bad a snake or something didn't slither out and stick its tongue out at you. I also noticed many green pixels are blown in the first photo, probably done in pp since the blue is missing in the mix.... I didn't check the rest. Did you lower the blue saturation in pp or was it because of your camera setting? It still looks good as a low key photo but loss of color shades means loss of detail.

selmslie Loc: Fernandina Beach, FL, USA

Thank you.

They were all taken over a 10 minute period around 10 AM facing either east or west.

I just checked with RawDigger and the only images where the green channel approaches within 1 stop of the limit are the ones with white or yellow flowers. All of the others are well to the left, about 3 stops from the 16,000 level. There should have been no blown pixels in the first image. I will check later.

I did not touch the saturation or hue in PP. The WB was set to 5209 (Daylight) and the hue to 0.2 in Capture One.

MikieLBS Loc: "Southeast of Disorder"

Well, nice photos. What I was talking about was some of the green color shades being blown, something I have been studying, it's similar to blown exposure except it is the color shades that flatten out to the same color. It's no biggie though and it's pixel peeping. It is what the author intends for it to look like that's important too.

selmslie Loc: Fernandina Beach, FL, USA

My fault. Hasty post processing.

In the screen shot below of the Capture One session you will see that when I set the white point (bottom histogram on the left) I went a little too far.

For the corrected image I moved the white point to the right of the end of the histogram. Although the difference probably can't be seen it should no longer have a blown green channel.

ETTR proponents might argue that I should have used more exposure but you can see that the histogram is very flat at the right end - impossible to detect on the camera (did not even trip the blinkies) and not even easy to see in RawDigger. By changing the Y-Axis range in RawDigger it shows that the first image is actually within one stop of the 16000 limit.

This is, of course, pixel peeping to the extreme but it confirms that the exposure was reasonable.

Screen shot of original PP with blown green channel.

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After white point setting corrected

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RawDigger with exaggerated Y-Axis

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