Development of my Practice - Stepping Outside of my Comfort Zone
I don't usually shoot in shot light, on an overcast day. Usually, when the sun is high in the sky, contrast, deep shadows and extremely bright highlights, is when I choose to shoot. Although, I've recently discovered what a challenge sunlight poses, both in practice out in the field and during post.
Without realising before, I'm trying to consider how to expose for equal amount of detail in the shadows and highlights, most of the time I'm in a position of either exposing for the shadows or the highlights, whichever, I usually loose detail in the foreground or little areas of detail, which is just as difficult as trying to rescue some of blown out highlights from complete oblivion.
Following a bit of research, I decided to venture out and photograph on an overcast day, using a tri-pod, live-view, exposure compensation and the blur-focus method, the result of this much slower, considered process towards my landscape photography practice is the image above.
I'm quite pleased with it as a first attempt, the aim of using exposure compensation was to lighten the shadows in the foreground to bring out a bit of extra detail of the tree and space between the branches, without sacrificing detail of the highlights in the background, which creates a minimalist, white background, allowing the autumnal colours of the leaves to stand out, to pop out from the frame.
