Oleg's Blog

The weather was truly amazing today! After more than a month of continuous raining it was finally sunny and warm. You know, it happens sometimes in the Summer.

I came home at around 8PM, took a shower and was thinking about having a power nap, but then noticed a nice quality light that comes through my window. All the colors were truly warm and juicy, and the shadows were soft and very dreamy. So I quickly grabbed my covered with dust camera and ran outside to hunt for pictures.

When walking down the staircase and thinking about where to go nearby at this time of a day, I suddenly recalled that there's quite a nice graveyard not far from the place I live. It has lots of trees, old fences and statues. And apart from that, there should be no people at this time. Seemed like a perfect place to go and watch the play of evening light and shadows.

After maybe 10 minutes of walking uphill I finally got to the place. I was right – it was a perfect place for that evening, as the sun already started to hide behind the trees and neighboring buildings. I looked around and noticed a small greenish statue of an angel not so far from me. I came closer, made a few circles around the statue and noticed that the sun shines through the trees and could possibly help me to get a good shot. I turned on my camera and switched it to aperture priority mode – just to test out the scene. Then I set the aperture on my 50mm prime lens to f/2.2 and fired once.

As I was shooting against the sun, camera's automatic exposure system decided to set a pretty high shutter speed, so the image got really underexposed. I tried to fix it, setting exposure compensation to -2, but it didn't help much... The image was still quite dark. So I decided to switch to the fully manual mode and got a few shots. The image got exposed correctly and I was quite happy with it and moved forward, as the sun was almost hidden by the trees. I wandered around for maybe another 20 minutes, took few more pointless shots and went home, being satisfied with the angel's shots.

When I got home, I uploaded all the photos to my laptop and started sorting and editing them. The first image was really dark. I could only see the silhouettes of the angel and the trees. Other images were quite good. So I've applied some magic to one of those, which had the most contrast and sharpness in it, and was already about to upload it online, but then I decided to give the very first image a try. Just to see how much I can pull out of it. So I brightened the image and made all other sorts of magic there and noticed that the noise, which started to appear in the dark parts of the image, was actually quite interesting and only added more drama to the whole composition, making it even more attractive than the other one! I even put both of them aside and compared on screen. No doubt: the second image, which I thought was lost, was actually a winer. So what I just want to say here: don't delete underexposed photos from your camera, but try to get the most out of them first – you could be pleasantly surprised at the end