Getting more detail in the clouds

[bigbirdoz]

Hi - I am relatively new to digital photography and am quite happy with this shot, but am wondering how I could have got more detail in the clouds.



Exif info:
Camera Canon EOS 600D
Exposure 0.001 sec (1/1250)
Aperture f/3.5
Focal Length 18 mm
ISO Speed 100

All advice greatly received.

[dlambert]

The "usual suspects" for this sort of thing are (1) HDR, (2) RAW post-processing, and (3) some sort of graduated ND filter, not necessarily in that order.

In your case, "true" multi-exposure HDR could be a little tricky because of the wave action you'd see between shots, but I bet you could do something HDR-like manually on specific portions of your photo in Photoshop. Similarly, a graduated filter might be tricky because you wouldn't want to expose the sky on the right any more than it is already. You could try aligning the filter diagonally to darken the lower-right just a bit and meter for the upper-left, but I'm really not sure if that would be exactly what you're looking for.

If it were up to me, I think I'd opt for trying to pull additional detail out of a RAW file in post-processing. I've seen the "recovery" slider in Lightroom work well for photos like this; the "clarity" slider might be helpful as well. There are all sorts of plugins that do similar stuff to create HDR-like images from a single exposure, too.

[flytyer57]

Your clouds may have lost a lot of detail due to the aperture setting you used. Next time try using something like f/10. Read this article on hyperfocal distance to get a better idea of using the correct aperture. You could also do a search on hyperfocal distance and depth of field here on this site or Google.

[Krusty79]

Why did you use f/3.5 on a shot like this? Most lenses are sharpest around f/8 and you''ll get more DOF. F/11 would have been a good starting point. If you shot RAW or bracketed your shots, you could make one jpg for the bright part of the sky, one for the darker part of the sky and one for the ground and blended the exposures using layer masks.

Do not use any cheap filters that can degrade your image quality (if applicable).