The Camera is Wrong Again

 Touring a reproduction U.S. Civil War display I spotted a tent in the style of the times and tried a camera metered exposure shot. I wanted the fence in the photo and this first image is what I got. The tent was in brighter light than the fence and the surrounding foliage. While the tent was near the center of the photo it occupied a much smaller area than the remainder and look what happened. The tent is very washed out looking and has very little detail. The fence and foliage look fine but the tent was my main subject. There is no single, best way of approaching the problem. Let's look at one way.








Move in and isolate the tent. Now try an automatic exposure and see how it looks. In this case it was still too bright so I noted the shutter speed, 1/60 switched to manual mode and set it faster, 1/250 and got the exposure of the tent that I wanted and here is that shot.











Now I back up and use the same exposure and I have my original scene with nice detail and texture in the fabric of the tent.

Now a new issue is that the fence is a little darker than I would like so lets examine some possible corrections. An on-camera flash could provide fill, but the closer part of the fence on right would be brighter than the more distant fence portion on the left. So let's do the simplest solution in post (that's shorthand for post processing).

And, here we have the final version. Using Lightroom 5. (Earlier versions and most any RAW converter will work also. Even Photoshop Elements has a shadows/highlights control that will work fine.) In Lightroom I just lightened the shadows and most of that effect was on the fence. Left is what came from my decisions.

It took longer to write it and even longer for you to read it that the taking process actually took. The shot was taken in less than a minute and worked quite well.




Again comments and questions are welcome.

Jim