Shooting at midday (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Shooting at midday (2019)

scottkelby.com

34 pointsKaibeezy23 comments

This will correct one fairly minor problem with shooting in bright sunlight: incorrect metering. But it doesn't fix many of the other problems that lead to not-great midday landscape photos:

Stronger highlights suck out color. Highlights on leaves are white when the leaf itself is green, so when you have more bright highlights and strong shadows, the result is the foliage becomes desaturated. Instead of invited greenery, you get a harsh staticky jumble of white and black.

Direct light sucks detail out of shadows. When the lighting is diffuse because of cloud cover or a low sun angle going through a lot more atmosphere which then reflects it around, you have beams of light coming in from all different directions. This means more light is able to work its way into shadows. That in turn preserves imagery in there and gives you more to look at. In direct overhead sunlight, shadows are inky black and featureless.

The color is less interesting. Overhead sunlight is going through less atmosphere, so it hits the ground mostly white. That leads to a neutral color cast to the image. Angled sunlight goes through a much greater volume of atmosphere. Air doesn't scatter sunlight uniformly and the effect on light depends on its frequency/color (Rayleigh scattering). The sky appears blue and the sun a warm yellow or orange. That in turn means that directly illuminated parts of the photo get a warm cast and the indirect illumination gets cooler. In other words, beautiful warm highlights and blue shadows.

It just looks harsh and unappealing. Photos aren't just collections of pixels. We recognize what we're looking at. And humans generally find the angled indirect light of gentle morning on the heath more inviting than the boiling overhead glare of a desert sun.

You can take beautiful, striking landscape photos in midday, of course. But you can't nullify its effect. The light you choose will determine the photo. Sunlight is as fundamental to photography as the human subject is to portraiture.

I hate shooting at midday and it isn't just because I want to crank my aperture open and blast the background into delicious bubbly soup: it's because I find it unflattering to have people squinting and glaring at the camera. Even if you have the option of putting the sun behind them you're often fighting harsh contrast where shadows cross their body. Of course, this is mainly a problem when shooting people but they're my favorite subject so... no sunny 16 for me if I can help it :)

What people often perceive as a "good picture" is really a picture with some sort of novelty. That novelty can manifest in several ways, including an artistically balanced composition, unique lighting, being in a place on Earth that few people have been, resonating with cultural values of the viewer, or having a deep story depicted by it.

Sunrise and sunset shooting is often because you can achieve that sense novelty almost purely with lighting alone. It doesn't need to have a story, be in Antarctica, it could just be a flower with a pretty sunset and people will consider it a good picture because the lighting is novel.

But lighting is not the only way to achieve novelty.

If your picture has an exceptionally good story or good composition, mid-day shooting doesn't really present much of an obstacle.

Here's a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo that was likely taken in mid-day:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_vulture_and_the_little_gir...

Here's a famous photo of a cellist that goes quite deep on musicians' love for their instruments:

https://cellomuseum.org/the-photographer-and-the-cellist-doi...

The Sunny 16 rule was coined as a guide when film cameras were the norm and light meters were not on all film cameras. Any relation to digital sensors is a coincidence.

side note: Film in sunlight is far more forgiving than digital. It handles dynamic range a lot better.

"Any relation to digital sensors is a coincidence."

The colour science of these sensors is designed to emulate the characteristics of film, it's not just raw sensor data coming in. So I wouldn't say it's a coincidence.

Also, in what way does film handle dynamic range better than modern sensors? That's definitely a case of "citation needed", I would argue :)

Sure it's possible to get nice shots at noon, but you're awfully limited when your f-stop begins at 16. Depth of field is important, and some cameras don't even have a 1/8000 second shutter. That's why it makes a lot of sense to go for sunrise and sundown by default.

With Sunny 16, wouldn't you only need a 1/8000 shutter speed if you're trying to shoot at 8000 ISO? Which would be an odd choice on a sunny day...

No, you would need 1/8000 if you want to have an aperture that's wider than, say, 5.6. When harsh light forces you to close the aperture too much, you lose any chance to create bokeh, and thus lose a lot of artistic options. Plus you get more diffraction.

This. You lose most of your nice bokeh by f/5.6. If all you want is a certain kind of landscape shot, cool, it won't hurt you, but there's a lot of artistic photographers who can't do with that.

Shooting at dusk or dawn isn't just about the exposure. It's about the quality of light. Colors will appear different in ways that you can't easily get by futzing around in Lightroom. It was considered one of the greatest developments of Impressionist artists in the 19th century that shadows in paintings began appearing blue. No, tweaking the shadow tint doesn't do it.

Also, the original author should know that they don't need to stop down. They can also use a neutral density filter. But that doesn't change your scene's shadows or quality of light.

You can also just put a filter on the lens that cuts out light.

This is kinda getting away from sunny 16, but with digital cameras in daylight, I find it better to not expose for the scene, but to expose for the brightest thing on the scene: the sky. That will leave you with a camera image of a well exposed sky and puffy clounds, and a dim foreground or subject perhaps, but thats a non issue. You just shot in daylight at probably iso 200, that means you can import that raw file into Lightroom, and pull up the shadows and have that dim part of the image look fine, while preserving the sky.

If you expose for the scene, you are probably going to blow out the sky. Once its overexposed like this, you can't just crank down the highlights in lightroom. The sensor just reads pure white light in this region; there isn't any information there like in the shadows.

This is kinda the opposite to how you'd expose with a film camera. For film, its better to expose for the shadows. Too much light hitting the film emulsion doesn't matter, you can fix that when you image your prints by using less light, no information is lost with overexposed film (unless its REALLY overexposed e.g. opening the film door). If you underexpose something severely, then information is lost because not enough light hit the film emulsion to impart an image.

This must explain why I always feel like I need to crank up the exposure in lightroom on sunny day photos. I'll have to set it to full manual to sunny 16 and see what difference it makes.

The line that caught my eye: your camera is being tricked into metering reflected light which, in bright sunlight, causes it to read the scene incorrectly because of harsh highlights and shadows…

Effectively: Try to override clashing inputs by using a reasonable average setting. Seems like I could (and probably do) apply that in other venues: cooking, music, personnel management, etc.

The sunny 16 (and overcast 8) rule is an easy way to remember what the values are, and it's not really an average: The incident light on a scene on a cloudless day when the sun is directly overhead doesn't change.

The average reflectance of the scene changes, but in photography you mostly don't care about the average reflectance, you care about the incident light.

This is better actually. You want to have as little blown out as possible because you can always crank up shadows in post. Whereas if you overexpose the sky for example, there is no information there for you to pull down because its been blown out.

Shooting in full sun at midday is great if it's bone chilling cold, and you've got a polarizing filter to get those deep, deeeeeeep sky blues, assuming your fingers still work.

Otherwise, keep the polarizer, enjoy the warmer weather, and focus on landscapes and things where the harsh shadows don't matter as much.

Of course, the best days for mid-day shooting are when it's overcast, and the entire sky is a softbox.

The two golden hours per day are your best bet for nice colors when the sky is clear.

I've really only ever thought of Sunny 16 as a rule to use when shooting with a camera that doesn't have a light meter. Another trick you can use is to enable center weighted or spot metering on your camera, then take more control over which part of the scene the meter is using to calculate exposure. ie. If you're trying to expose for detail in the shadows, point the center of the frame at the shadows and lock the exposure.

Exactly what I do. Or adjust manually since I use mirrorless.

There's a little more to it than that: The light meter in any given scene is trying to set the average exposure to middle grey, using reflected light in the scene as a hint.

This will never work well with a photo of, say, a black cat sitting in the snow. You can't spot meter for the snow or you'll massively underexpose the cat, and the snow because snow isn't supposed to be grey. You can't spot meter for the cat or the snow will be blown out and the cat will end up looking brown. In regular evaluative metering camera will end up trying to meter for an average of 18% grey and unless the exact ratio of cat-to-snow is perfect will almost certainly get it all wrong.

This is the same scenario with most high-contrast scenes. Black paint on a white wall will have the exact same problem.

You're essentially left with having to manually control your exposure: If you're outside in the midday sun, you can slam it over to sunny-16 and get something relatively close, or use an incident light meter to actually determine correct exposure.

If you do take photos outside during the day, I honestly suggest giving it a shot, because it's incredibly helpful and even if it doesn't improve any given shot it'll improve your understanding of how to meter.

I just started shooting bracketed exposures last week trying to captures exterior of homes better. I’m going to try this.

Is my intuition right that this is not achievable on a smartphone due to the limited/fixed apertures?

Some of what this does is what the fancy software on the phones tries to do in software.

Kinda.

The values are all reciprocal. While you can't stop down to f/16 because of the fixed aperture, you can increase the shutter speed to compensate.

Assuming ISO 100, so an initial starting shutter speed of 1/100 and a phone with a fixed aperture of f/2, then you need to calculate the difference in exposure between f/16 and f/2, which is six stops. If you compensate by setting your shutter speed to 1/6400 (i.e.: six stops over 1/100) you'll be in line with Sunny 16.

This depends on having manual control of your exposure and a phone with a shutter speed that goes that high, but I think most do.

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