Shooting in bright light

[Tineke123]

Im about to head out and shoot a building for work. today is really bright with beautiful clear blue skies. but im nervous about over exposure. does anyone have any tips or suggestions for shooting at these times ? (1-2 afternoon)
also, i hoping to capture pedestrians and cars streaming by so would need a slow shutter speed.

[Goofup]

You might try shooting with an EV of -1/2 to control any overexposure. Also try a CP filter- that will help with the colors but also drop it a couple of stops. You're gonna need a small aperture (large f-stop) to keep that bunch of light coming in down some so you can use that slower shutter speed you want.

[windrider86]

depending on what look you are going for. shooting in bright light can sometimes produce a really dramatic picture. skies will be blown out but if you are shooting at buildings you could possibly create something industrial.
Black and white always works well too with a lot of contrast. just something to think about

[slyder0244]

just opening up your fstop as wide as you can to get the shutter speed you want as well as lowering the iso to 100 and using a neatural density filter would really help here if you want to get the people streaming by that's what photographers use when taking photos of waterfalls to get long exposures from the water

[candleman]

aaaahhhh.. the days of clear blue sky's in auckland.. its been raining for the last week!

[i_luv_ph0tos]

summer here... and we went to a beach... a nice one... and i think clear blue skies don't cause overexposure to images... well.. that's for me.. =)

[homersapien]

Bracket exposures and then blend in Photoshop. A neutral density filter will bring the shutter speed down, if you're looking for ghost trails from the people/cars.

[mountaintreker]

Yes, bright sunny days can present those high contrast scenes that play havoc with exposure settings. I don't know what kind of building you are shooting or shot and under what circumstances the building is exposed to, so I am only guessing, but if you can you might consider leaving the sky out of the image if possible. Try just shooting the building. If it is in the the shade you can expose for it pretty well showing great detail. Maybe the building has reflected light from another source hitting it, and you can expose pretty well for that also. The problem lies when you have too much of two things too much light and two much shade in one scene, usually beyond what the sensor or film can record accurately. Our eyes can handle the contrast and get the whole thing right, but a camera with limited dynamic range has problems.

Mountaintreker

[vandergus]

Another thing you can play with is using a fill flash. Using the flash on a bright sunny day, you say? Indeed. The purpose of the flash in this case is to decrease the contrast in the shot by lightening the shadows. This is often used with outdoor portraiture to prevent harsh shadows on the subjects face. I'm not sure how well it will work with archetectural photography. It will depend on how far you are from the building and the strength of you flash.

I agree with mountaintreker that you could also use exposure bracketing if you are shooting from a tripod.

And lastly, use your histogram. In high contrast scenes, it's easy to lose your highlights. If your camera provides a histogram in the playback mode, you can check it to make sure you're capturing as much information as possible. On a histogram, a blown out highlight looks like a spike at the far right hand side of the graph. If you see that, add some negative exposure compensation and try again. Don't worry if you're shadows look too dark, you can lighten that later in post-processing. You just want to make sure that you capture as much information as possible.

[chins]

You may want to try the 'sunny 16 rule'.
1. Put your aparture to F16
2. And set the shutter speed to approximately inverse of your ISO setting. if ISO = 200. then set your shutter speed to 1/250th of a second.