RED rose...

[AlwaysOnAuto]

Went to a local public library today with my wife. While she was inside getting some more books to read, I spent my time trying to capture the red roses in the nearby flower garden.



SOOC jpeg, except for cropping. Very bright sun as it is @85* today.

[JBW]

This is of course a case of personal preference but I find Roses exhibit their beauty more fully from a slightly less frontal angle. Perhaps a shot with the Rose buds forming more of a frame running top left to bottom right?

Nevertheless that is a fine shot on a bright day.

[Inkanyezi]

A red flower against a green backdrop with spots of shadow is one of the trickiest subjects for the light meter. It will fail, always.

In spite of your moniker AlwaysOnAuto, you did set this exposure manually, and you overexposed by at least one stop regarding the red flower (if saving as jpeg), which renders red washed out and flat, as it is clipping over large area of the petals. You used 1/320 f/10 at ISO 200 in bright sunlight, which rather should be 1/200 f/16 according to Sunny16, but likely a tad less when the sun is at 85 °. Hence you would get exposure according to Sunny16 at 1/400 f/11, which is about one stop less than you set on your camera.

There are two ways to cope with the problem:

1. Either you can expose at least one stop less if saving as jpeg. Then shadow tones may be restored by crumming the curve upwards at the left side. This will increase noise in the shadows and in the green leaves, but the rose petals would be rendered well.
2. Or you can expose only a tad less, 0.3 or 0.7 stops and save as RAW, perhaps bracketing to find the best exposure. With careful conversion you will not get as much noise in the shadows as in the first case.

The sensor of your NEX7 has a very wide dynamic range, so it can cope with these tricky lighting conditions, but exposure has to be held back to render the rose well.

[IzzieK]

Urban beats me to it, but yes, I do find the rose overexposed. Red is very hard to photograph. I've done it recently with the rose on my deck. Thank you Urban for the tip...

[AlwaysOnAuto]

Thank you all for the input.
I should have said it was 85*F outside yesterday, with the sun nearly straight overhead when the shot was taken.
Here are photos of my post processing software window which shows the original RAW file w/histogram and with the exposure set to -1.0.
Is this what you're suggesting Urban?
RAW


RAW -1.0 jpeg


For what it's worth, the photo really does represent the flower as I saw it, as it was very difficult to look at it in the bright sunlight and actually see the petals they were so bright.
Again, thanks to all for the inputs.

[Inkanyezi]

Here are photos of my post processing software window which shows the original RAW file w/histogram and with the exposure set to -1.0.
Is this what you're suggesting Urban?

The problem with overexposure is that no pp can correct it, as there is no such thing as setting exposure in pp. You can make the image darker, but you cannot retrieve data that is not there. What happens as you set the "exposure" slider to minus when a channel is blown, is that it continues containing no useful data, it only becomes darker. The only way to get full coverage of all tonality is to expose so that it does not hit the max level. Exposure is done in the camera, never in pp. And the histogram shown is not a RAW histogram, but the histogram when converted according to actual software settings.

I cannot see in the shot of your computer screen whether it might be possible to retrieve red tonality, but my gut feeling is that it might not be possible, as the Sunny16 rule usually is more confident than any light meter.

In bright sunlight an exposure of 1/320 f/10 will blow highlights. Here it has done so in specular reflections in the leaves as well as red in the rose petals. It can be seen very clearly in the red channel histogram for the jpeg image. Some of the tonality, but not all, may probably be possible to retrieve from the RAW file. An exposure of 1/400 f/11, which is -0.7 compared to actual exposure, might have saved tonality in the petals, but they are bound to be blown when overexposing about one stop. As you are closer to the equator than I, you probably will have to close down a tad more than the Sunny16 rule.

[Geoff F]

You can try using a different exposure etc but I find the only safe answer for this sort of shot is to only shoot when the sky is lightly overcast or to add a bit of artificial light shading.

Substantial under exposure to suit the over bright areas tends to cause excessive shadows elsewhere; although sometimes setting the camera manually to correct the over bright problem plus careful use of flash can be worth trying.

[Inkanyezi]

Substantial under exposure to suit the over bright areas tends to cause excessive shadows elsewhere /.../

It should be noted that I have not suggested the slightest under-exposure, but correct exposure. The image was over-exposed by about one stop vis à vis Sunny16. but might need another 1/3 stop less exposure to retrieve all tonality in the red petals. Sunny16 is generally more trustworthy than the camera light meter. The image metadata says zero bias, although I was a bit sloppy when reading the f-number. It is not available, as it was a foreign lens on the camera.

Anyway, Sunny16 is a safe bet in sunlight, and the light meter tends to suggest too much exposure for this kind of scene, that has a lot of dark area and only a rather small portion of one single colour that is clipping. The fully blown out red is registered by the meter as a full red plus two black channels, blue and green.

[AlwaysOnAuto]

Thank you both, Urban and Geoff, I'll try to remember to under expose next time I'm shooting in bright sun, which is generally most of the time here in Southern California.

At least I was able to hit the focus this time 'round.

[Geoff F]

As Urban said, when the flower is just right it is correctly exposed; but you may have to use some negative exposure composition or spot meter on the flower and enter that manually to get what you want, which could produce under exposure and heavy shadow in other areas.

[DanK]

another option is to use a small diffuser, like a small Westcott. It is very hard to get nice results in flower shots taken under such harsh lighting, but a diffuser can make it manageable.

[Geoff F]

Yes I use a Lastolite Difflector now for any flowers shot under sunlight.