Thursday, November 04, 2004


Early Morning sunrise, with some of the locals praying to the sun god. Posted by Hello

posted by Dolph Brust at 10:42 AM 2 comments

2 Comments:

Blogger martin said...

Nice scene, but difficult to capture in a photo. I'm going to assume here that you are using a digital camera. The problem here is shooting into bright sun. This is a problem because of the extreme contrast in the scene and the camera's narrow exposure latitude. Two suggestions regarding the exposure: a) bracket the exposure by using the exposure compensation control and underexpose by one or two stops. b) wait for the clouds to move in front of the sun to diffuse the light. Sometimes just waiting a minute or two will make a big difference. Photography is at times a waiting game. Patience and practice is advised.

Friday, November 5, 2004 at 10:45:00 AM PST  
Blogger Warren T. said...

It's funny, when I see a picture like this, I automatically think: Sunset :). Then I remember that you're on the East Coast. I like the clouds and the sun's rays shining through. Unfortunately, I can just barely make out the sun worshippers at the edge of the dark area. This type of scene is probably the most difficult to expose properly because, as Martin noted, the range of lighting is too much for the recording media to capture (be it film or digital).

An interesting fact about digital pictures and digital capture is that sometimes there is more detail in the shadows than is immediately apparent. I was curious, so I downloaded your picture and looked at it in Photoshop. In fact, the dark, lower aread of your picture has a lot more detail that can be brought out by doing some correcting in Photoshop.

A few notes about the composition: Sometimes a centered horizon may not be a good idea since it tends to chop your picture into two separate pictures. For this particular shot, you may want to crop out the lower 5th of the frame to make the clouds and sun more prominant. After I lightened the lower half, I was able to see the sun worshippers' positioning more clearly. You could have moved closer to the people to make them larger and easier to spot in the frame (give you more to see in the foreground).

This was a good idea and theme, and with just a little additional Photoshop work, this picture can be even better.

Thanks for posting. Keep it up!

--Warren

Friday, November 5, 2004 at 11:57:00 AM PST  

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