Simply no way to get around to the sunny side. Anyone have an hints for working on the shady side in bright sunlight and snow? Pretty much just silhouettes.


Cookie did about 250 frames today, and virtually nothing worth keeping.

Put your camera on manual and add a few F-stops, or with automatic, press your shutter button about half way on the darkest part of the animal, then move the animal to the center of the picture. The light meter will adjust according to the darker setting, then when you take the picture, the animal will be right, but the background will be over-exposed. It will look a lot better for the subject matter...

Spot meter on the animal and know the background will be blown out,
or
Maybe blend two images- one exposed for the animal, the second for the snow,
or
wait for a cloudy day, dawn, or twilight.

You might do some levels adjustments, especially the midrange. Also play with the highlight/shadows/midtone contrast sliders, and maybe add some local contrast with 10/50/0 USM.
It did not look like much clipping on the dark side in the histogram.




May have warmed the temp too much (as seen by the snow color) as the shady side of the elk was originally a little blue.

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A bit of work in photoshop can help a great deal.

In Photoshop, under the Adjustments column, there is an option for Highlights/Shadows. Click on that and adjust those levels to bring out some detail. At the same time you can bring your highlights down. The default settings are too extreme in my opinion, so play with them to your liking.

Thanks guys. I'll show this thread to my wife.

Thanks again guys. Cookie was most impressed with the various manipulations generated or suggested. She does make use of the focal points and such when shooting in quick attempts to regulate exposures, but she does little in the way of post processing. Mostly she simply does a Photoshop "sharpen" when she down sizes an image.

She spent about an hour last night playing with some of her elk shots, and did bring out quite a bit more detail. That bull actually does have eyes! Some colors went a little funky, but she might be able to rectify that with the hue/saturation features. Due to some gene issues on my mom's side, I'm little to no help when playing with color. Orange and blue elk look perfectly fine to me.