Backlit exposures
Cat Portrait by the lower pond
Here I want to expose for the sun, so that it looks like the orange ball I could see.
The camera had gathered enough information in the dark area for a garduated filter tool to bring out some of the features using a Lightroom adjustment brush or burning and dodging in the film days. But it's easy to overdo this kind of post processing. Better light works better than post processing.
This portrait shot straight into the sun is stopped down enough that the sunset is pleasing, but the face is hidden.
Detail crop of the previous image gives us an abstract pattern.
In this image, the sun is just a tiny bit out of the frame above it. This keeps the super bright light near the sun from throwing the exposure too far off and allows us to enjoy the details this reveals.
Backlit pampas grass with lighting issues or grace notes
This is the second shot I made of the pampas grass that evening. When I shoot into the sun, I normally take two or three shots with slightly varying angles because I know that I may end up with some optical artifacts produced by excess light bouncing around inside the lens. Whether this contributes to the composition or not depends on how you want to view the image.
final version is a sunset photo
After checking out what auto tone did, I turned it off and began working the cropping and exposure tweaking tools to come up with this version, something that would look good on a wall in some decor schemes.
Original exposure out of the camera
This photograph illustrates both the advantage and disadvantage of bright sunlight. The extremes of light and shadow that the eye compensates for is too much for the camera, in this case a DSLR. The human subjects are just black silhouettes. Sometimes, though, the contrast and the silhouette effect works well. But if I had been trying to get a picture of the couple, if they had been facing me, there isn't enough information in the original image to recover gracefully.
Apply auto tone and one spot touchup
In my post processing software, Lightroom, there's an autotone button. It does an excellent job of recovering visual information in a fairly graceful manner. I use it a lot when processing photos taken in poor lighting situations -- it will tell me what detail is lurking in the shadows. Doesn't work the other way, though. All white will remain all white. Auto tone tells me there is not enough detail in the foreground to see the people clearly. By using more aggressive tweeking with lightroom's touch up brush, I can bring out some detail, but the digital graininess is more than I care for. However, I can now see that there is a nicer distribution of colors in the sky.
These are the tweaks I used in Lightroom to finish this image.
Lightroom adjustments to a spot
By applying the touch up brush and aggressively tweaking, I can see more detail, perhaps enough for face recognition. But not enough for a decent photographic image unless the subject is way more important than the technical or aesthetics values.
