Morning In the park - help

[jamesev]

This morning the sun is coming up and it a bright orange ball, the mist is lifting off the park and the river running through it, perfect for a shot.

However I either get the path / trees all dark and the sun and the river reasonably lit or the trees and things ok and the rest blown out. Am I being ambitious trying to capture the sun and the misty morning.

I tried metering virtually everywhere.

Any suggestions welcome

[RichardTaylor]

Shoot RAW for more flexibility when PPing.

Options.

(1) Use a graduated ND filter
How To Use Graduated Filters

(2) Keeping the camera stationary take a number of shots at different exposures and merge them when post processing.

(3) Similar to (3) use HDR

(4) With just one exposure, expose for the highlights and when PPiing try to recover the dark end. You will probably need selective noise reduction on the dark end. This would be my last choice.
Sometimes third party software can help,like Topaz Adjust (I have no affiliation with them besides using their products,.

This is what I have done here.


Here I have processed one RAW pic, shot in bright sunshine near the middle of the day, twice (once for the bright bits and once for the dark bits (the left hand side of the "building") and merged both processed pics together.

[jamesev]

Thanks for the tips Richard - tried again this morning - it was a little bit better as I had more time to move the metering point around and added a bit of eV

[RichardTaylor]

Glad to hear you had some success.

[bbtom10]

Also, I know technically it shouldn't make any difference, but I find when the sky and the sun is overexposing the image, dropping down to a smaller aperture (higher f-number) generally means that the light is a little more balanced - shooting wide open just creates a huge splash of light which is very difficult for the camera to cope with - try experimenting with the aperture size.

Tom

[jamesev]

Originally Posted by bbtom10

Also, I know technically it shouldn't make any difference, but I find when the sky and the sun is overexposing the image, dropping down to a smaller aperture (higher f-number) generally means that the light is a little more balanced - shooting wide open just creates a huge splash of light which is very difficult for the camera to cope with - try experimenting with the aperture size.

Tom

Thanks Tom