Geodesic dome reflection

[RainaStars]

Hello, I'm a self admitting wanna-be photographer newbie and one of my main problems I'm trying to work on is getting a bit better with skies.
I'm looking for a bit of advice on how to not have them be so blown out. This day the sky was overcast, but there is still no detail of the clouds. Had it been a clear blue sky I would still have a white sky picture. Ideally I would like to not have a lot of post processing to do, especially since I haven't quite jumped on the HDR bandwagon just yet.
Any comments and critique are welcomed!



Climatron at festival by StarsShadow, on Flickr

EXIF data
Canon T2i
1/250
f/4.5
23mm
100 ISO
(Let me know if there are any other details I need)


-Raina

[EOBeav]

One basic rule about photography is that sunlit skies (even filtered skies) and shadows don't play nicely on a digital camera sensor. When your sky is well exposed, the ground below is likely to be underexposed. And if your ground level subject is well exposed, your sky will be blown out. Like you have here. Some people use GND filters to accommodate this problem (I don't), and others use the computer to blend two (or more) images where each part is well exposed. There are some good tutorials on blending images in Photoshop or GIMP. And, you can also use Photomatix to automatically blend different exposures to get what you're looking for, without necessarily resorting to HDR.

Also, if you have overcast skies, you're likely not going to get detail out of them no matter what you do. Sometimes you just don't have the atmospheric conditions to pull it off.

[Krusty79]

I mostly shoot near sunset, use a 2 stop graduated ND filter and I still have problems with blown out skies sometimes. I've been blending the exposures to compensate for that. If you're shooting in the day, you're going to constantly be battling dark foregrounds and blown out skies. I'm thinking of getting a 3 stop ND grad. Navcom says he uses that one all the time. That way, you are altering the light before it hits your camera, not altering the pixels in the image you have already taken.

Also, I'm curious why you used such a large aperture for a scene that looks like you would want to maximize your DOF.

[vainqueur]

If you are worried about taking multiple shots for HDR, you can try doing RAW, take 1 nice shot in RAW then do your HDR from that 1 RAW file. Do a search in this website, there is an article written by the nice photographers from this website.