Southern Oregon

[froggyfan]

Taking my first DSLR for a spin. C&C welcome

 

[Ysarex90 84]

Congrats on your first DSLR. The E-420 is a nice camera.

Your photo has some technical problems; the highlights in the clouds are clipped. Clouds should retain detail throughout and not have sections that burn to solid white holes in the photo. At the same time your foreground is dark and flat (lacking contrast). I don't know if you did any editing but I suspect this is pretty much how the photo came from the camera. The root of the problems is the lighting -- the scene is backlit.

Over on the right there's a horse and you can see it's shadow falling toward you. That puts the sun high in the sky to your right and shinning toward you. That lighting condition (backlight) raised the scene contrast to a very high level and beyond the range that the automated software in your camera can handle. As a result the clipped highlights and poorly exposed foreground. As you keep learning the most important thing you can learn to do here is identify the lighting condition before you take the photo. Technical solutions to this kind of lighting exist but they pretty much require that you see it coming. Your camera for example has the ability to save a raw file. In the raw file the highlights wouldn't clip however processing skill then is required. One acceptable response to this kind of lighting is to recognize it and then photograph something else. I pretty much scream this at my students every class: Amateurs look through their cameras and see the subject. Pros look through their cameras and see how the subject is lit.

I took your JPEG and made some adjustments to correct some of the problems for you to see. I could only do so much given the JPEG. As I noted a raw file would have permitted a complete correction.

Joe

 

[froggyfan]

Thanks Joe! I love the difference in what you were able to do. It's nice to see the difference. Luckily it's from my front porch so I can still catch the right lighting for the shot

I will definitely keep your advice in mind, thanks so much!