Wooded area with alterations.

[Brokuhn]

Hello

I'm new to photography and this site but I am really enjoying it.
This was a picture of a wooded area behind my school. I thought it was cool because the light was shining through the trees. All I did to alter this pic was add a frame border and a color correction. Other than that its a raw pic.

Any tips/tricks are greatly appreciated.

Sunny side up. | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

[JFSanders]

Hey, thanks for taking the time to post this. Welcome to DPS.

Your image is a good starting place. It is overexposed though. When you have a high contrast scene such as this it is a metering nightmare that can cause you fits. You have to make some compromises. If you want the foliage to be properly metered the sun rays will be blown out. So you meter for the sun rays and your foliage goes to black! Arrrgh. So you get creative and put on a graduated neutral density filter and expose for the foliage and let the filter cut down the sun rays. Bingo! you get a nice set of rays coming into properly lit foliage. But you don't have a GND filter so you take two exposures, one for the sun rays and one for the foliage and combine them in CS5 and you get the same result. Or you expose for the sun rays and go artsy with the foliage or you muck about in post with your original and try to get something you can be proud of.

Jim