Bright sunshine
There are at conditions on a bright sunny day that a photographer can take advantage of. One is to place the subject so the sun shines directly on it at an angle that brings out the details of the subject. The photo of the cat painting is a good example of that. Cell phone cameras like bright sunshine used this way.
Another is to place the subject where there is a large area of "open shade" where the shadows disappear, the subject is evenly illuminated by the reflected sunlight bouncing around the open shade area. The portrait of the artist who made the painting shows this open shade condition. However, open shade can be a challenge for cell phone cameras.
Yet another is stop action sports type photos, where the sun is providing plenty of light for stopping action in mid air. The woman with the sword is an example of stop action combined with panning to blur the background.
And sometimes the extreme contrast between the light and shadow makes for a good photograph. The river sunset shows an image that worked well in that condition, after tweaking.
The most common problem with bright sunshine is photographing a person with the sun behind them. With most cameras, there is enough information in the image file to recover the too dark person, as in Anna by the river.
When the contrast between a light subject and a darker background is too great, however, the image file won't have enough information to bring out a good photo.
A Theresa Berg painting on display on the north side of Alley A. She and her partner and other collaborators had a whole show going on. This cat immediately reminded me of a kitten recently running around my house with frequent expressions very similar to this. Where she had placed the painting on the north brick wall was the perfect location for getting an excellent photograph of it. The sun was beaming down directly on the painting, and it was high enough that the photographer's shadow isn't intruding. This single source very bright light produces a level of detail that is amazing for a cell phone camera, considering the tiny lens being used. At full resolution, every brush stroke can be clearly seen. The phone camera used 1/640 sec at f2.2, ISO 50
Theresa Berg at her show in Alley A, Columbia, Missouri. The diffuse "open shade" lighting provided by the south side of Alley A was excellent for a good person picture. However, the lack of shadows makes the image flat, lacking in depth. As a snapshot, this works great. The cell phone camera used 1/240 sec at f2.2, ISO 50
Theresa Berg at her show in Alley A, Columbia, Missouri. It is possible to use standard post processing, the kind used when making prints from film, to modify the tone curve a bit and fiddle with the highlights and shadows to make a better looking photograph. However, when I cropped the image to a more traditional face portrait composition, the noise in the original image is now visible in the brick wall. Some of them look kinda plasticy, smoother than they were.
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.
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.
Catching action requires good light.
Bright sunshine or very light open shade is needed to get nice stop action images. I prefer a bit less than full sunshine so I can use the panning technique to show the motion more clearly, even if I lose a bit of detail to to subject and camera movement.
This is the most typical problem with bright sunshine. The background is clear, but the subject is way too dark or underexposed.
With a "full frame" DSLR camera, there is quite often enough information in the image file that an excellent recovery can be made with standard post processing in Lightroom or other photographic oriented image processing software. Here I simply cranked up the exposure a full 3 stops This is now a much better photographic representation of Anna. If I had been more on my toes, I could have used the +/- button to do this at the time of taking the picture. Most cameras have this button, but I rarely use it on my big DSLR since I have so much more information in the image file.
Using full range of exposure controls
Rather than simply bumping the exposure, I generally prefer to work with the more subtle controls, tools such as highlights and shadow control, much like traditional film printing tweaks. This way I can preserve a bit more texture detail in the water and background trees across the river. This version is the one I would display, one in which I didn't touch the exposure, but worked with the other controls to bring out the image I knew was in the photo.
In this case, bright sunshine directly on the subject resulted in blown out or overexposure of the subject. The contrast between the sunlit part and the shaded background was too much dynamic range for the cell phone to handle. The phone camera decided the exposure should be 1/60 sec at f2.2, ISO 50. It averaged the bright light on the subject with the quite light open shade behind the subject, resulting in a loss of detail and red fringing artifacts on the too bright subject. The relatively slow speed also failed to stop the motion a little bit of breeze was causing.
