light with texture or dark with detail ?

[mfreg]

Hi everyone, I'm not sure what to do with photos like this. If I pull down the brightness, the contoured surface of the snow under the fence is seen and the rest of the snow has texture, but I lose the texture of the wood plank and the color of the post. Is it worth the trade off ?


Camera: Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi
Exposure: 0.002 sec (1/640)
Aperture: f/8.0
Focal Length: 20 mm
ISO Speed: 100
Exposure Bias: 0 EV
Flash: Off



Camera: Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi
Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/1000)
Aperture: f/8.0
Focal Length: 20 mm
ISO Speed: 100
Exposure Bias: 0 EV
Flash: Off


thanks for looking, and your views.
mike

[lputman]

I like the second one better. When I look at the first one, I immediately think 'under exposed'. I don't see too much loss of texture in the plank or loss of color in the post.

[mfreg]

lputman.....thank you so much for the reply, I was startin' to get a complex..

..yes, I totally agree with you that the 1st one looks underexposed...I need to work on my exposure when shooting snow, I always lean toward underexposing so I don't blow out the highlights. When I think I'm exposing correctly the "brightness" of the snow always seems to obscure the subtle details. It's that slight "shadow" under the bottom fence rail that I don't want to lose and in the 2nd shot it's very difficult to see.

Can I ask you something, do you think using a fill flash would have helped here or would I have just gotten a lot of glare off of the surface of the snow ?

thanks again for taking the time to reply.

regards
mike

[lputman]

I'm not certain about using the flash. I would think you would have gotten glare. I don't get too many opportunities to shoot snow, we get it once (no more than twice) a year and it usually lasts the one day. I meter off the snow and then increase my exposure by thirds. I end up with multiple shots with different exposure values, but I like to see the difference in camera that changing the exposure makes when shooting the snow.


What photo imaging software do you use? There are some things that can be tried in post to get better exposure and keep the contour.

[mfreg]

What photo imaging software do you use?

For these I just used the software that came with the camera, Canon digital photo professional, I downloaded GIMP a few weeks back but it's kind of overwhelming. I really don't know what to do with it. I've been hanging out a little in a GIMP begginers group on flickr but it's hard to find the time to practice. What type of processing would you reccomend trying on this type of photo ?...

again Lori ( can I call you Lori ?? )....thank you for your input. I appreciate it.

regards
mike

[lputman]

Of course you may call me Lori!

In Gimp, using the first photo, I would do a duplicate layer and change the blending mode to one of the modes that will lighten. Then I'd reduce the opacity of that layer and possibly even brush back some of the lighter areas with a grey brush if they remain too light.

I'm not a GIMP user, I installed it on my work laptop but I haven't really used it. I'm a Photoshop CS3 user.

Normally I would do an edit and post but my pc at home has crashed and I really can't edit using the laptop monitor.

[Nathan deGargoyle]

Hi Mike, I think the problem with the first one is more to do with White Balance. I see on Flickr that your WB was set to Auto. Your camera is fooled by all that snow and is trying to make your picture an average 18% grey. I also use GIMP and I did an Auto WB (colours>auto>white balance) on it and it made the snow white but retained texture while bringing out some of the grain on the wood.

Snow is very difficult to expose and WB right. My solution is to shoot in RAW and adjust afterwards.

[mfreg]

Lori, I will give that a try, working with layers gets a little confusing to me some times, I think tend to over-complicate things. I'll try to do what you suggested and see what happens.

Nathan....That worked, very well..I'm so glad you brought that up because I felt a lot of the photos in that set had a bluish hue to them.....I did take the photos in RAW, and tried to correct the WB with the Canon software, none of the pre-set WB settings looked right so I tried using the temperature settings, but I just couldn't make them right. Using the auto WB function in GIMP really did a nice job....thank you for the help,
My next question is how do you get it out of the camera right in the first place ?. I took about 100 photos that morning and maybe 30% of them came out with that color cast.
Anyway, I'll save those question for another day...thank you both for helping.

regards
mike