Scottish Rock Garden Club Forum
Bulbs => Galanthus => Topic started by: mark smyth on February 24, 2014, 07:00:07 PM
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Can someone give me some pointers on how to photograph snowdrops using a DSLR. I tried stepping down the exposure by two stops but they still come out over exposed.
I'd like to take shots of groups of snowdrops in the garden
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Mark, depending on what exposure priority you are using it could be that your pictures are over exposed. Try using aperture priority in conjunction with your minus 1 or 2 stops that should work. If you use shutter priority and you are in bright light it may be that you have not selected a high enough speed to get a good exposures
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Using shutter or aperture priority makes no difference to the ultimate exposure "value" as increasing one will reduce the other. I would use spot metering off the white snowdrops and dial in +1.5 to 2.0 Ev of overexposure.
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As the others have said "exposure compensation", -1 or -2. Metering mode - use "center spot", point the center of the frame at the brightest white.
After that M manual mode.
Save photos as RAW can often give you a second chance at getting the exposure right.
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It's a natural instinct to wait for a nice bright day for photographing garden plants. However, with white flowers an overcast day is best.
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It's a natural instinct to wait for a nice bright day for photographing garden plants. However, with white flowers an overcast day is best.
Trouble is, it's on the bright sunny days that the snowdrops tend to open up wide perfect for photography. Same with crocus.
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Try using aperture priority in conjunction with your minus 1 or 2 stops that should work.
That's what I was doing Ian. I'll post some to let you and others see the results. Maybe I'm being too critical
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Thinking about that conundrum, maybe it might be worth trying (on bright sunny days when the 'drops are wide open and perfect for snapping) using something to shade the snowdrops - a big sheet of card or something to stop the sunlight shining directly on them. In other words find a way to create your own overcast conditions on warm sunny days.
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Maybe some horticultural fleece to filter the sunlight?
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You could increase the layers of fleece as needed to cut down the direct sunlight.
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I would use spot metering off the white snowdrops and dial in +1.5 to 2.0 Ev of overexposure.
How do I do spot metering? I better go to youtube
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Martin is correct I'd like to photograph them when they open
Maybe I am being too critical. Maybe .5 or 1 more stop down will do.
Angelique, aperture priority, -2 stops, bright sunshine, reduced in size and sharpened slightly
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Excelsis
Wendys Gold
both same settings as above
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They look fine to me, think you're being too critical ;)
I find auto exposure bracketing on my canon useful, takes 3 images one is what the camera thinks it should be then one under, and one over exposed, continuous shooting needs to be enabled.
saves a lot of fiddling around and generally produces a useable image. Does fill the card up quickly though.
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I have to say when I first started using a DSLR I had similar problems and it does take time to get used to them. The answer at the end of the day is practice, practice, practice. You have a digital camera so it doesn't matter if you take a dozen shots to get it right. Yes you can use software to tweek them but there is nothing better than getting it right in the camera. But most of us are not professional photographers so much of the time we make mistakes. Getting control of the camera and using the manual setting is what I aimed for but it took time. I now use RAW all the time and it does, as said in an earlier post, give you extra control back on the computer but can be time consuming.
Looking at your photos, like Richard I don't think there is a lot wrong. The two of Angelique may be slightly over exposed but I would change that on the computer with 'shadows and highlights'.
Sun is always a problem but again, as said earlier, make your own shade but brightish cloudy days are best.
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The two of Angelique may be slightly over exposed but I would change that on the computer with 'shadows and highlights'.
Never knew I had a shadows and highlights button but have found it. Thanks
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The human eye has a much wider dynamic range than a digital camera sensor. On a bright day when the sun is high in the sky a digital sensor will inevitably "blow" the highlights whilst the dark shadow will show no detail. The exposure meter in your camera is designed to set a "mid-tone" exposure.
In a uniformly lit scene without excessive areas of brightness or darkness it will yield an accurate exposure reading but with a snowdrop against a much larger dark background it will over-expose the whites.
The default exposure meter setting is of an evaluative type which "reads" the entire scene. To prevent blowing the highlights you need to "confine" the exposure meter so that it only reads the exposure of the snowdrops you want to photograph. Depending on how close you are to the snowdrop this will mean setting the exposure meter to either centre-weighted (if snowdrops occupy much of the scene) or spot-metering (if the snowdrops occupy a small part of the scene). With the spot-meter centred upon the snowdrop you will get an exposure reading which will render the white snowdrop as a "mid-tone" -but snowdrops are white so you will have to compensate by over-exposing to make the whites white and not mid-tone grey: this usually involves an over-exposure of 1.5-2.0.
It doesn't matter whether you take images in RAW or JPEG, if you blow the highlights no amount of post-processing can restore detail to these highlights though post-processing can rescue detail from the shadows.
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Thinking about that conundrum, maybe it might be worth trying (on bright sunny days when the 'drops are wide open and perfect for snapping) using something to shade the snowdrops - a big sheet of card or something to stop the sunlight shining directly on them. In other words find a way to create your own overcast conditions on warm sunny days.
Good point Martin, I overlooked the 'drops not being full open is overcast conditions.
Most of my photography is undertaken in natural conditions and direct light can cause 'glare' problems in many situations and not just with white subjects. As I'm photographing close to the ground in most instances a friend or partner blocking the light with their body is often sufficient. When alone, I use my rucksack or backpack. I have tried reflectors and other materials which may work well in other parts of the country but not in this windy part of Scotland.
It's worth mentioning tripods. I always use one and would recommend other to do the same. They can be a fiddle and some extra weight to carry but in low light conditions such as the early part of the year, you can use lower speeds and gain that all important extra depth-of-field.
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Most of the time I use a digital use compact, and I shoot with about a stop of underexposure whether I use program or aperture priority. Exposure is either trial and error, or learning how to fool the camera into giving you what you want.
The basics of metering haven't changed since film days .. the camera will always want to make things grey / midtone. If it does that with the average scene, then any small highlights will be blown. The old rule was 'expose for the highlights' .. i.e. expose so you preserve the highlight detail, i.e. underexpose the highlights .. and 'develop for the shadows' .. i.e. you can lift enough detail out of the shadow areas even when, af first glance, they seem to have blocked up completely. That all still holds for digital .. digital just gives better tools for retrieving shadow information.
As has been said, once highlights have been blown, that's it. Depending how much time you're willing to spend on it, you can draw in detail where the information has gone .. a simple way is to paint a light grey tone over the blown highlight and then clone in a suitable texture from an area that's correctly exposed. Having created your fake highlight information on a separate layer, you can play with the opacity to get something that looks ok.
Very often there is actually some highlight detail around the edges of the blown area .. it can be virtually invisible to the eye. It is possible to effectively amplify that information, and that can sometimes significantly reduce the area that looks blown. Pick a very light tone and having loaded your brush with it, set the brush to multiply, with opacity around 10%, and paint carefully in around the edges of the blown area. The amount of information you can recover can be surprising. As before, you do it on a separate layer and then play with layer opacity.
If I want to work critically, as I would shooting a model, I use an incident light meter. You are measuring the amount of light falling on the scene, not the amount reflected from one particular bit of the scene. Incident meters are inexpensive and you can learn to use one in less than an hour, then it's just practice and experience. You still have to make judgements about what in the scene you want to look dark or bright, but you should quickly start to get much more accurate exposures faster. So long as the light levels stay reasonably constant your exposure shouldn't need to change from shot to shot. With any reflected light reading you are at the mercy of the accident of how the particular things you're aiming at are interpreted by the camera .. how wide the metering area / how large the area you want to correctly expose is relative to the overall frame. It will change even as you zoom in and out on a particular target.
It sounds more complicated to use an incident meter, but in reality, with a little practice, it's easier, quicker and more accurate.
A large format camera has an aperture control and a shutter. Otherwise it's an unthinking empty box. The camera is very, very simple so you have to do everything yourself. A digital camera does everything for you; you only have to press the button .. it couldn't be more simple. You just have to decide which sort of simple you want.
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Bob Wallis and I were discussing the difficulty of photographing snowdrops recently - I wondered if the 'face-recognition' facility would work with snowdrops like Grumpy..... I'd love to know, but don't have that one. Please someone say you'll try it!