Friday was Kelli’s birthday and we went to Ruth’s Chris to have fatty, buttery steaks. That was pretty awesome.
Saturday involved a lot of sleeping, and missing a coaches meeting at the dojo because I didn’t know about it. But in the evening we wandered down to Chaser’s and watched The Strand and Mankind is Obsolete. Good show.
Sunday I woke up late and at around 12:30 in the afternoon decided I should get out and do some shooting. I figured it would just be a throw away day, but a good chance to get used to the battery grip on the 5D.
I was going to head up to Oak Creek Canyon, but instead headed over to Beaver Creek instead.
Turns out it was an awesome day for shooting given the almost black storm clouds to the north, and the broken sun to the south. I got some really great shots. Unfortunately I’m stupid and during sunset, with some of the best shots, I was shooting handheld running from location to location. I was exposing to the right, and was seeing just a little clipping in the clouds on the histogram, which I’m okay with in order to keep shadow detail high. Unfortunately I was also clipping out the red channel pretty badly, and for some reason I wasn’t catching it on the 3 color histogram. I thought I was close to the right side, but it turns out I was pretty far over. Doh. So the sunset shots are pretty nuked. This makes me sad as the scenes were just amazing. They are okay for web stuff, but too much detail is gone for a full sized print.
So rule of thumb for super high dynamic range shots like sunsets: don’t go over half a stop over exposing. Exposing to the right is awesome when there’s nothing bright in the scene, but for sunsets, pay close attention to the red channel and if you think it’s blowing, just play it safe and bracket. Thank you come again.