How can I adjust my digital camera to deal with bright patches of sunlight in forrest scene.?

Question

I have an Olympus E-500 .What adjustments can I make so I don't get bleached out areas where there is a sunlight patch in a forrest.

On auto focus it still can't deal with sharp contrasts of sunlight and wooded shade on a sunny day.

Thanks for your ideas.

Answer 1

That's a very difficult shot. You can do as a previous poster mentioned - use RAW mode, shoot in a manual exposure mode or use EV compensation, expose the highlights properly, and use Photoshop's curves adjustment to bring up the darker areas. Problem with this is the darker areas may become noisy after the curves adjustment.

If you want to get fancy, HDRI (High Dynamic Range Imaging) is a neat technique. You take a number of shots to properly expose the different areas. The HDRI program will meld the shots into one properly exposed image. Sometimes it looks a bit unreal due to the extreme latitude you can get. You need a tripod to do this as all the images must line up with another.

I've used Qtpfsgui to do HDRI. Best results are using RAW format images for HDRI photography as the camera will bugger up the linearity of the image when compressing from 12-bits to 8-bits.

http://qtpfsgui.sourceforge.net/

Answer 2

It's quite a difficult picture to take. So I would recommend either of these two post-processing so that you need not sacrifice the angle for taking the good shot:

1. Use local contrast enhancement offline. This may yield better results than doing it on camera

2. Enable D-Lighting feature on a Nikon camera or a similar local contrast enhancement feature on the other cameras.

http://www.nikondigitutor.com/eng/5900/0...

Answer 3

Try bracketing your photos for the best exposure.  You can also try exposing your shot manually, and then adjusting your photos +/- to over/under expose the photo, play around with different exposures until you get what you want.  As for the auto focus, use manual focus, that will solve that problem quickly.

Answer 4

you need to switch to manual mode then adjust the shutter speed to a faster setting and save in RAW mode then you can adjust any contrast issues in your computer using Photoshop or similar program.