Monday, September 14, 2009

The issue of sunlight

Here is a technical question for you budding photographers.

The situation: I am slowly crawling along a narrow beach at high tide, occasionally wading, to reach the thousands ofsandpipers and plovers on a narrow stretch of beach. When I get close enough to start shooting, I run into the problem of shooting into the sun. Colours are washed out and there is haze. I can't get to the other side of the beach because I would disturb the birds and they may not return. I am shooting with a 100-400mm zoom lens.

How can I minimise the effects of the sun, such as losing colour saturation, and haze etc. This question is directed at both the camera and post-processing RAW captures.

Any thoughts on that?

7 comments:

Colin said...

Polarizer?

Anonymous said...

ND filters?

Damian Lidgard said...

OK. I am using a rather large lens so polarizer is too much for me. I have a UV filter on and that is it.

But lets say that I am there on the beach and all I have is the lens, UV filter and a hood.

D

Colin said...

Run home and get a big polarizer?

Or try bracketed exposures and stitch them together later at home?

Anonymous said...

Stop down to f22 and hope that a longer exposure 0.5s is fast enough..

Colin said...

Slight aside: I read somewhere that if you make your aperture too small your image can become somewhat unfocused due to diffraction. Any comments?

Anonymous said...

I know that it is harder to achieve focus and there can be some funny artefacts at small apertures like f22. I think focus point selection becomes more critical and clearly tripod use essential.

Ivan