Late afternoon, sun behind the subject. Expose for the face and the sky is a white blob. Expose for the sky and I get a silhouette. Raising shadows in the edit goes noisy and grey. I know people get glowy backlit shots with an intact sky, so I am clearly missing a step somewhere. What is it?
Check for flare as well. Sun behind the subject hitting the front element washes the whole frame out and no exposure setting fixes that. Flag the lens with your hand just outside the frame and see how much contrast comes back — it is often dramatic.
Expose for the highlights and lift, but do it properly: expose so the sky just holds detail, shoot raw, and lift the shadows in the raw converter rather than from a JPEG. The greyness you are seeing is partly that lifting shadows flattens contrast, so you have to add contrast back locally on the face afterwards. Noise is a real limit though — two or three stops of lift at base ISO on a modern sensor is fine, five is not.
Lifting shadows also drains saturation from skin. A small saturation boost inside the same mask is usually what sells it.
Bracket three frames and blend. Unfashionable for portraits because people move, but for a static subject it works fine.
For portraits I would rather bracket the background and blend a single frame of the person in. Faces and blending do not mix well.
@nightbus_nina · 9mo ago · 3 replies
The step is putting light back on the face. The range between a shaded face and a bright sky is more than the sensor holds, so no exposure setting solves it. Cheapest fix is a reflector — silver or white, held low and angled up from about a metre and a half, and you need a person or a stand and a clamp. Second is a small flash at low power with a diffuser, which also gives you catchlights. Third is moving: put them at the edge of open shade with bright sky behind rather than the sun directly behind, and the ratio drops a couple of stops for free. Shooting twenty minutes later also shrinks the whole problem, because the sky itself is dimmer.
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@sightread_sid · 9mo ago
A reflector felt like overkill for casual shots, but that ratio explanation makes sense.
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@nightbus_nina · 9mo ago
A white foam board from a stationery shop is about four euros and does 80 percent of what a proper reflector does. Just awkward in wind.
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