people knowledgeable about photography...

[gopunk]

how do you take a picture of a distant object set against a bright background without the background being super bright and/or the object being super dark? it's distant, so flash doesn't do anything... are there techniques for this?

 

[Anubis]

meter for the dark object

 

[gopunk]

ah... that makes sense. but would the bright section be terribly over-exposed at that point? i guess there's not much to do about that..

 

[Bootprint]

If you are doing digital you might be able to take some bracketing shots and layer them with photoshop. This of course presumes that your camera can do bracketing and the object doesn't move.

 

[Anubis]

Originally posted by: gopunk
ah... that makes sense. but would the bright section be terribly over-exposed at that point? i guess there's not much to do about that..

yes it will make teh light stuff brighter

but how far away is this thing? if its too extream it might not be dooable

 

[gopunk]

Originally posted by: Anubis

Originally posted by: gopunk
ah... that makes sense. but would the bright section be terribly over-exposed at that point? i guess there's not much to do about that..

yes it will make teh light stuff brighter

but how far away is this thing? if its too extream it might not be dooable

like it would take me half an hour to walk there.. i'm just looking at a bunch of landscape shots i took in china and noticed this problem (like for great wall pics, where the wall is set against the sky). so probably undoable huh 🙁

 

[Wallydraigle]

Originally posted by: Bootprint
If you are doing digital you might be able to take some bracketing shots and layer them with photoshop. This of course presumes that your camera can do bracketing and the object doesn't move.

This is a useful technique if have a steady tripod. I don't know what camera you're using, but if you have acces to the RAW files there is usually enough data there to meter for the bright background and bump up the brightness of the dark object in post processing and get decent results, but with JPEG it probably won't turn out so well.

 

[Anubis]

Originally posted by: gopunk

Originally posted by: Anubis

Originally posted by: gopunk
ah... that makes sense. but would the bright section be terribly over-exposed at that point? i guess there's not much to do about that..

yes it will make teh light stuff brighter

but how far away is this thing? if its too extream it might not be dooable

like it would take me half an hour to walk there.. i'm just looking at a bunch of landscape shots i took in china and noticed this problem (like for great wall pics, where the wall is set against the sky). so probably undoable huh 🙁

no i ment how far away is the object from the camera. you said :="distant object" how distant? if you are trying to get a wide angle shot of something against a bright sky your gonna have to bracket like lirion said

 

[TechnoKid]

Does the background and the object have to have the same focus? If not, then you can try manually setting the apeture and the exposure; changing the aperture will affect the "depth of field" so the background may go out of focus, but you can then somewhat control how much light hits the film and changing the exposure will help you compensate for the brightness of the background.

This sorta reminds me of taking shots with the sun in front and not behinds you. It's been a while since I've taken pictures with my Pentax ME Super.