So help me Dan. And my statement to minniev was discussing the image. minniev got the exposure she needed to get the image she got perfectly. End of discussion.
I know you were talking about the image and you said the exposure needs to be perfect to get some blue in the sky.
I posted my opinion saying why the exposure does not need to be perfect to not clip the skies as you stated with your opinion.
For scenes like that the exposure can easily be 1/2 a stop smaller than perfect and the sky will still be blue without significant degradation of final image quality, especially if shooting raw and editing in 16 bits.
Interesting discussion, thanks for joining in. The scene did indeed exceed the camera's capabilities as you note. Mid-day on a super bright cloudless fall day, extreme contrast in scene. My camera is old, and it's an m43 camera so it has a small sensor. I know its limits so I shoot to get not a finished file but a file I can work with in post to recreate what I saw (in this case), or sometimes what I wish I'd seen. In such circumstances there is little room to the right to expose to, so I capture what's available and work with it. I'm not a formulist, and getting what I need to create the image I imagine is what drives how I shoot.
YES, I got the exposure I needed to create the final image I envisioned. That is what I do whenever I'm taking pictures. I am not wedded to the results of a capture. I am driven by the imagined final result and what I mean to do with it to take it where I want it to go. If I don't have a clear idea of where I want it to go, I just try to get the most good pixels I can, and will await inspiration later. In this case, I knew I wanted to recreate what I saw and not be limited by how the camera captured it with its limitations and the lighting conditions of a bright mid-day.
I think we may be arguing semantics. Perfect for me means the best file to do what I want with. I think that is what Mike means, not necessarily perfect by the textbook definition in the manual I studied when I was learning to use my camera.
And for whatever reason the exposure blending did not yield the results I expected and usually get. I have my files so I'll try again with them when I have time. I had hopes that I'd be able to get more from that effort than I got. But this image was pretty much what I saw when I came upon it on the rightly named Fairyland Trail.
A bit of HDR effect but I really like the photo.
I think you used the full dynamic range of the camera.
The composition, the vibrant colors and the sensitive post-processing make this photo a feast for the eyes.
Very informative, very interesting.
I'm surprised at the ideas the artists come up with.
I would have liked to have seen the photo with the flags a bit bigger, i.e. more pixels.
Is there a convention that says that, in a scene like that with very little sky content, the sky should be blue or is that your personal opinion?
My personal opinion is that an exposure beyond ETTR followed by a slight increase of the shadows and an increase in mid-tone contrast would be more toward @minniev's preference. For example:
I was not consciously lining up the diagonal line of flowers with the shadow line during the "shoot." The contrast between the different elements in the scene was different than the photograph conveys. The room was very bright with light in a way that doesn't come through here. But from several images taken over about 20 minutes, this one "felt right" to me. The shadow was moving across the wall during that time, changing the relationships.
In my opinion, two things could be improved:
1.) The sunlight in autumn is very strong, so the photo should look much more dynamic. The photo seems to have been taken in such a way that the highlights are protected, but the rest of the photo suffers as a result.
2.) At least some detail should be visible in the roots of the tree so that you can see what happened to the tree.
I am following this discussion and I don't think it will lead to a result that everyone involved is happy with.
I know the dynamic range of my cameras and how much I can overexpose, so I can make everything right in post-processing.
In this respect, it is not important which exposure Minniev chose.
The important thing is that she achieved a very good result.
