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harmon that's an excellent shot there pal. Love the mood in the shot !!

@Samurai : Thank you!
Hmmm, I guess I will have to do that.
Will check the Dslr thread for details and speak to Rudra Sir after zeroing down on a few.
We have moved seriously off topic here.
I will leave this discussion here.

@Harmon
Just brilliant! Lovely light n great mood there!

An overcast winter morning at Nevada.

Regards,
TG.

@harmon: Brilliant shot buddy! Their expressions are super.

By big beercan you meant a DSLR? Actually 'beercan' is a pet name given for this lens, (70-210) I have one. This lens is loved by many, and the reviews show that. And the 'big beercan' happens to be this one. (70-300)

@TG: The Nevada shot.. I love the colors!

@clevermax
The purple haze was quite amazing to watch, it is not a pp color, the color was actually there! Quite insane stuff when seen live!
Regards,
TG.

@Clever :
Sorry my bad.
Guess I was in some kind of a misconception there.
Thanks for sorting it out brother.

OT : By the way I'm getting the DSLR next month, so pray for me that I can save up enough and I dont have to postpone it any further.

Shot these in Kerala last month. Only when you go near these big fellas do you actually realize how BIG they really are!

@Proxima
Lovely backlight on the elephant's ears! Wow!

Thanks TG, a comment coming from you made my day!

The pic was brighter but I used Canon DPP to darken it a bit as the background looked a bit too bright. Now that it is darkened, the elephant itself looks too dark. What to do in situations like these?

@Proxima: Was that shot at "Anakkotta" the elephant stable near Guruvayoor temple? If yes, then I have a similar shot from there, in my flickr page.

BTW, The back light on elephant's ears is awesome. It scares me

Thanks Clever. Yes, it was near Guruvayur, a place where they maintain some 60 odd elephants.

Your shot of the elephant carrying leaves and tree trunks are fabulous, you posted it here some pages back if I am not mistaken.

Can you guide me on the question I had in my last post?

@Proxima: I assume you shot a jpeg there. As TG mentioned earlier, cameras fail to capture the dynamic range like what human eye sees.

In order to have the elephant and surrounding areas properly exposed, the camera metered it according to the light there, but the light coming from the background sky was too bright and those areas appear blown out. That means the pixels over there has no image information at all instead they are all peaked out at their RGB values in the Jpeg.

So you cannot just recover the image information which was there in those areas even if you try to reduce the levels or darken the whole picture. And yes this will darken the other portions of the image too, which is unwanted.

I'm no expert but in situations like this I guess you can do few things

1) Try to avoid brightly lit sky as far as possible from the frame when you want to capture a subject in the ground

2) If you have the option, shoot in RAW and later recover some image information from highlights and low-lights which looks as if they are blown out or completely dark, by High dynamic range processing or by blending few images from the RAW whose EV is different.

3) Take several exposures and blend them to make an image which has better dynamic range. (I guess some P&S cameras also have exposure bracketing)

4) Use multi segment metering, which would, in some cases, expose correctly so that the sky as well as the subject is more or less exposed properly - later you can adjust the levels selectively and make a better image. You can have a negative value set as the EV, may be -0.7

5) If you are close enough, use flash and light up the darker subject a bit, so camera won't over expose the shot and make the sky in the background look too bright.

6) Dirty way, PP a neat looking sky in the blown out portions :D

I may be wrong in some of these points and there may be other possibilities too.

Lake

Duck


More Lake


Duck again

@clevermax Can't we add- 7. Use a lens hood.

Clever, I just want to add 2 points for a Nikonian (if that helps!!). Spot metering is explained as a tool when the subject is in a 'brightly lit background' and even 'background darker than the subject'. Then we have a tool called 'Active D-lighting' which is exclusively meant for subjects that are in a brighly lit or higher contrast scenes. I believe 'fill-flash' also serves the same purpose, but not with a tusker for sure !!!:)