Colorado Mountains -

[egarcia.dz06]

I will rephrase my question.. I took this photo of my husband and son when we were on our way back from Grand Junciton, CO. I really love how I could get them standing in front of the sign but the mountains in the background seem to be too bright and a little blue as well. When I tried editing it to show more detail and color.. it didnt seem to work well for me. Im not really great at the photoshop thing and all the colors seem to literally almost clash together. either too much blue makes the mountains blue too or too much green makes the sky green. Is this something with my camera or do I need to change some settings, Ive spoken to someone about the exposure settings and that seemed to help with my sunset/sunrise pictures. Also, this is the original photo I had taken and it was about 3 or 4 pm I beleive when I took it. I hadnt changed the time or date on my camera until just recently so the timestamp shows it was 9 pm when I took it.

From 2009-04-15

Camera: SONY
Model: DSC-W120
ISO: 160
Exposure: 1/1600 sec
Aperture: 2.8
Focal Length: 5.4mm
Flash Used: Yes

Anything will help and If my question sounds confusing... I can re-ask. thanks everyone.

[windrider86]

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[jpitz31]

First of all you have to ask yourself, are you taking the picture of the people and the sign in the frame or are you shooting the mountains and sky?

You can do both but then it looks like a snapshot. In this image the range of brightness and shadow is beyond the limits of your camera. The light meter on the camera saw that the majority of the image was darker so it exposed for the mountains, people and sign. Which then blew out your sky and clouds. In this case you have to decide what you want to shoot and then expose for that scene. You have to either expose for the darker scene and frame accordingly or expose for sky let the mountains fall towards the shadows.

You have to start seeing what your camera sees. You have a limited exposure latitude and have to either trade off for the highlights or the shadows.

If you have access to photo editing software and a tripod you could shoot this image using HDR (high dynamic range, google it) technique.

Think and see like your camera.

Thanks

Joe

[egarcia.dz06]

Thank you. I understand now looking at the picture and I will look that up.

If i wanted a picture of just the mountains.. zoom to only the mountains must be my only option correcT?

[jpitz31]

Yes, One of your options, If you want some of the sky, use your flash, This will narrow the brightness range as the flash is brighter and will bring the difference of exposure of the people and sky closer together. Learn to shoot on manual or use EV compensation to purposely expose the sky slightly under exposed then let the flash properly expose any people in your scene.

Thanks

Joe

[Krusty79]

Another option is to get a graduated neutral density filter so the sky won't be so bright relative to the rest of the image. That would be a lot less labor intensive than going the HDR route. Sometimes the HDR images look over-processed.