HIGH CONTRAST DULL SKY AFTER RAIN

In some sense this picture can be taken easily because the wide angle and large depth field provides a safe setting to achieve sharp picture. These settings are the most standard ones and supported by several cameras (incl. compact ones) however, the light condition is complex to worth to be considered. These settings are rather general ones, which fit to the scene and actually the light condition was not considered too much. Let’s go on with the ambient light. The photo was taken right after a tropical rain when the sky was still dull and high contrast of the shadow below the Helix-bridge and the highlights of the sky were more than desired. Besides the lighting condition there were a 57-storeyed building and also a long bridge, which should be composed together.

High contrast

What can we do with the contrast? A standard solution could be to use a speedlight. However, in the scale of the shadowed area under the bridge, an ordinary flash could not be a solution. The only way is to find the right metering of the light or underexpose the picture, to keep the sky not to be burned out. This is what I did, keeping all the details of the clouds and having almost black shadows. For the first sight it not an attractive solution but it definitely works in case of RAW files, where the tones can be adjusted later on. In this case I had to brighten the shadows/blacks and darken the highlight/whites with a significant amount. What was the result? There are detailed clouds in the sky and the waves of the river came out from the shadow. The adjustment of the light reduces the saturation of the colours that might be compensated by increasing simply the saturation or the vibrancy. This option works well if the picture was taken in RAW format. In case of JPG the adjustment is less efficient.

Dull light

Further improvement of the dull light is limited as there are no nice shadows and lights, which would emphasize the shapes and contours. The only facility is to increase the ‘clarity and vibrance’ during the RAW picture adjustment. This process also gives the opportunity to improve the reflection of the clouds on the glass surface of the building.

Exposure

Aperture priority (AE) was applied, which automatically provided shutter speed of 1/40s at the value of 100 ISO. This shutter speed is rather slow to use image stabilizer (it was not an option as the 16-35mm f2.8L II lens has no IS), tripod or some stable support for the camera. However, the slow shutter speed provides enough time to reach some light from the shadowed area to the sensor, which make possible to recover some details during the post processing. The aperture was set to f/11 that provides quite good depth of field because its hyperfocal length is 1.2 m that means almost all the objects is sharp in the picture.

Composition

Marina Bay in Singapore is a marvellous place, where easy to find nice views, but it is challenging to take unique photo. I think it is not the main objective to spend a lot of time to take the perfect picture as a tourist; actually this is the job of professional photographers. However, if we would like to have a nice photo than it worth to spend some time to find the right place. I decided to make a portrait picture instead of landscape, because it emphasize the height of the hotel, which actually small in the picture. The Helix-bridge has an interesting structure however, it is rather difficult to find a good place inside where the metal bars and curves helps the composition. Nevertheless, there are small terraces over the river, which situated perfectly to take beautiful photos. I wanted to show the length of the bridge and also needed some guideline that leads the eyes to the both to the bridge itself and the hotel. The steel bars forming triangle in the left hand side of the picture give a strong lead that I wanted to have.