July 2021 • Nebraskaland 33
you can point the camera down enough to either eliminate or
greatly reduce the amount of sky in the photo. The amount
of contrast between the brightly lit and shadowed part of
the landscape may still be problematic, but at least you don't
have to worry about the even brighter sky itself. Another
option is to move in closer and focus on only the shadowed
or brightly lit portions of a scene, rather than trying to
incorporate both.
Often, however, even with those compensating strategies,
you'll look at an image on your LCD screen and see that you're
losing either the highlights or shadows. If your camera shows
you the histogram (a graph of captured light intensity) for
each image, you'll see that one of the two "tails" of the graph
are outside the histogram frame. If you can adjust exposure
to get both tails in the frame, you're golden. If you can't, your
best option is often to "shoot dark" by adjusting exposure
so the details within the brightest parts of the scene are
captured, regardless of how dark that makes the shadows.
Later, you can use whatever photo editing software you
have access to and try to recapture some of the details in
those dark shadows. In order to "shoot dark," of course, you
have to understand how your camera reads light and how to
The mid-morning sun was getting pretty intense for photography by the time this photo was taken, but because there are
few shadows in the image, there is limited contrast to deal with and the photo still works.
