Shooting outdoors

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Hi,
I am know very well to shoot soley indoors in studio but I have now opened my thinking into shooting outdoors. But I am a bit confused.......


Now if I decide to meter the sky....I find that my subject/model becomes underexposed. Then if I meter the subject/model, the sky becomes over exposed....can anyone give me some tips or links to info on shooting outdoors?

Should I adjust the shutter speed when exposing for the subject as to not overexpose the sky?

Any rules of thumb to follow when shooting oudoors?(no strobes)


Thanks in advance!

Nicole
 
The problem you have is dynamic range - the range of brightness from light to dark in the scene, which is too much for the camera to record. As such, adjusting the exposure won't help. You can choose to record the bright areas successfully, or the dark areas, but if you choose something in the middle you might not get an acceptable result for either.

In an outdoor scene, one popular way of overcoming that is to use a graduated filter - it's darker at the top, fading to clear. You position it so it just darkens the sky, bringing the whole scene within the scope of the sensor's dynamic range. Another technique is HDR (high dynamic range) where you take two or more images at different exposure levels and combine them in post processing.

This problem often happens when you're shooting against the light, especially shooting a portrait against a bright sky which then ends up as a silhouette. You mention no strobes, but fill-in flash is very useful for sorting that out.
 
Yeah, that'll happen, it's like metering your flashes @ f/8 on your subject with a nice grey background, then using a background light at f/32 - it's probably going to blow it out. :)

The sky is MUCH MUCH brighter than what's going on at ground level. You may need only 1/4000th to expose the sky, but a relativally whopping 1/250th to adequately expose a subject on the ground.

As Hoppy says, an ND grad filter might help, it'll drop the sky down by a couple of stops (or more, depending on which one you buy). But, if the person you're shooting is pretty much full height frame, that may also darken the top half of your subject too.

You could also try a reflector to help illuminate your subject outdoors - and it won't limit you to using the camera's sync speed (as you may be with a hot-shoe flash used as fill, depending on the brand of camera & flash).

You can only really use the sun as a rim/hair light if you have another source of light in front of your subject to stop them from becoming a silhouette.
 
Thanks guys for the tips, I will definately look into getting a gradutated filter.

Nicole
 
a reflector is a good bet, works very well when it's sunny (direct sun).

other than that, well, you need to find the light from somewhere... if you need sun overpowering, check out the lencarta safari.. ;)
 
I was reading a tutorial on this yesterday, mostly about reading histograms and what HoppyUK says above is almost identical to what I read on the tutorial :thumbs:
 
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