Scottwdw
Photographer
- Joined
- Sep 13, 1999
WOW...!
Rdunative - that last picture is just perfect.
Beautiful - well done indeed.
Milly
Animal Kingdom Lodge at Christmas by wbeem, on Flickr
Practicing with My New Camera
I just got a Nikon D800 and decided to take it out to the Disney World resorts to try it out shooting the Christmas trees. Damn, this camera makes big files. I learned I still have a few more settings to tweak to my satisfaction, and that I need to go back in the evening to avoid that bright background.
Still, here's the first effort with the new camera at Animal Kingdom Lodge. Used every millimeter of that 14-24 UWA for this one.
Nice shot.
I hope you don't mind if I ask a question. Outside of re-taking this same shot in the evening, do you have any tips in regards to minimizing the bright background? Would using a different metering mode help? I shoot Nikon and find myself using Matrix mode more often than not.
Woulds using spot or center weighted mode and basing the exposure off the tree help with minimizing the bright background? Or would such a strategy effectively expose the tree but leave the background woefully underexposed?
It's the power of the sun. I shot this with 9 exposures so I could really, really underexpose for that bright background. Three stops under-exposed for this scene and it's still too bright. A different metering mode wouldn't make that much of a difference in this case.
I could have switched to meter just for that highlight and under-exposed that area to blend in later, but everything else would have been pitch black. In fact, that's how my first exposure looked in the bracket. This was at ISO 100, F/11. Maybe I could have stopped down more or dropped the ISO to 50 to control that backlit area, but I saw some detail in the initial exposure on the back of my screen and though I had it right. Not quite, though.
In any case, even having detail in that frame - the background is still going to be brighter than the subject. That's what's really bugging me about this frame. Some people love backlight, but I'm not that much of a fan because it distracts the eye.
Better to just go back at night and take the shot without the backlight.
Thank you for responding...I appreciate you taking the time to walk though your thought process.