Strucar2 wrote:
Could be. I’m new to photography. Here is my scenario. I went to an equestrian event during the day( super bright out). So the majority of my shots were from an angle below the subject. You kind of need to look up to shoot a horse (at least from the ground). That being said my shots had a lot of blown out backgrounds. Plus everything looks somewhat washed out. I’m shooting raw with an EOS R and adjusting exposure according to the histogram in my viewfinder. I was thinking a nuetral density filter would help bring out the colors and reduce the brightness while still enabling me to shoot the horses in movement. Am I wrong?
Could be. I’m new to photography. Here is my scen... (
show quote)
Yes.
Basically, by shooting a dark hairy object
against a very bright sky you are creating
a "special effects" situation: overpowering
backlight. It's often used in very controlled
situations for fashion shoots, etc, etc, but
I can easily see where you don't like it for
your horses.
You can't solve this in-camera. Landscape
enthusiasts use a graduated ND filter to
reduce a bright sky without darkening the
landscape scene below it. But the grad ND
is basically half ND and half plain. It works
very well for landscape cuz the horizon is
there, demarking the bright sky from the
earth below by a fairly straight boundry.
If there was a grad ND for YOU, it would
have a horse shaped clear area and the
rest of it would be ND to darken the sky :-(
Your best initial procedure is to expose for
the horse and let the sky go, and this is a
definite case for shooting raw. If the sky
is not sooper brite, you may be able to get
it into useful tonal range from the raw file.
A jpeg is hopeless.
After the initial stage, you experiment with
using less than ideal exposure for the horse.
The raw file will allow you to correct for the
dark tone of the horse, but to just what
degree of correction is your experiment.
You can easily retrieve the horse back to a
normal looking tone at two stop under the
ideal horse exposure. That two stops will
help you fix up the sky.
The is no SOOC solution. And you need to
master the area selection tools in your PP
program, cuz you hafta SELECT the sky to
darken it without darkening the horse, and
then you'll "invert" that same selection to
work on lightening the horse.
Welcome to real photography :-)
.