Photos from Salar de Uyuni - looking for advice

mistadobalina · Jul 12, 2010

I just signed up, and this is my first post, so I apologize if I break some unwritten rule or guideline. I did my best to read the FAQs before posting this.

I just got back from South America, and while I like many of my photos, I just feel like something is missing in terms of sharpness and clarity, especially as compared to photos I took years ago. I realize some of this may be due to equipment (always easy to blame), but I figure a lot of it rests with me.

So in the hopes of improving my skills, I wanted to post a couple shots to get some comments and critiques. Below are three of what I consider to be the "best" photos from the same day, which admittedly wasn't at the best time (middle of the day, and it was incredibly bright). The scenery was amazing, and I figured that at least one of my shots would be a "10," but they all seemed a bit off the mark when I reviewed them later, so hopefully someone can give me some tips for what went wrong.

LaFoto · Jul 13, 2010

Welcome to ThePhotoForum, mistadobalina. And how I envy you your trip to South America. A part of this world where I have never been.

At 400x300px, these photos are a tad small to really be critiqued. What I can see is that, indeed, the bright white of the salt (?) must have made exposing right a nightmare in that midday light. But that's just about all I can really say.

pbelarge · Jul 13, 2010

Hello mistadobalina and welcome to the forum

Do you have larger images to post?

Maybe a little history on the location and some info from your camera settings.

Is that salt or ice on a lake?

mistadobalina · Jul 13, 2010

Here are the full-size photos. Hopefully we don't have the opposite problem - that they are too large. These are taken from Incahuasi Island, which is a small "island" in the middle of a salt flat. All of the tours go through here because they give some context, and some contrast, to miles and miles and MILES of nothing but flat, white, salt. I'm using a Canon SX10. I lowered the exposure to -1/3, because I had read before I left that the bright light, plus the high altitude (it was about 12,000 feet up), tended to overexpose at the base exposure.

mistadobalina · Jul 14, 2010

any other thoughts on this? If these are too bright to give any useful feedback, I could post some other pictures I took.

astroskeptic · Jul 14, 2010

I saved local copies of the files to see the metadata - your exposures are very short so the softness is almost certainly not motion ... my guess would be dept of field. Your shots are at f/5 and f/8 which is shallow for landscapes IMO. That could explain the softness through most of the depth but there should be some point in good focus. I looked through the first one and it wasn't obvious to me where that was so you could simply have soft optics. If you think that might be the case, you might want to try some testing.