Metering Hard Sunlight: Trust but Verify

One of my favorite places to shoot is southern Arizona. Not only are the deserts and mountains in that area beautiful, but the small towns have a great Southwestern charm. The only real problem with shooting in Arizona (other than that I have to fly to get there) is that at certain times of the day the light can be extreme and hard. And as much as I like to wait until the light is softer, shooting later in the day, for example, you can't just put the camera away for four or five hours and not shoot if your time is limited. Far better to look for subjects, like this pretty little storefront in the tiny town of Tubac, south of Tucson, that can hold up to the light.

Your next problem then is getting a meter reading that is accurate in such harsh lighting. Often because painted surfaces are so reflective, you think that you're going to get a good reading using a matrix meter and taking an overall reading, but you end up underexposing the subject. The camera simply thinks there is more light there than there is and, because it's determined to see all subjects as an average midtone, it turns the bright surfaces to midtones and banishes anything darker than that to deep black shadows. Not too attractive. The way that I handle this is to first just take a shot using the matrix metering and then looking at the LCD and the histogram to see how the test came out. If the histogram doesn't bunch up completely at either the left (the dark shadow area) or the right (the bright highlights) and concentrates most of its graph in the central area, you're fine.

If, on the other hand, the histogram does show too much shadow (there were probably a lot of highlight areas that fooled the meter into underexposing), you can simply add exposure compensation (I usually start with a full stop) and then check the histogram and LCD again. In this shot, for example, because the wall was close to a midtone, I trusted the matrix meter but the shot still came out about a stop too dark, so I added one stop of compensation and the combination was just about right. I was afraid to add more than that because the white doorway would have lost all detail. On this particular day I was shooting in RAW, so yes, I could have easily corrected the shot in conversion, but the closer you are to perfect in the camera, the less work you have to do later on.

In some extreme cases, if you have a large shadow area on a bright day, you may have the opposite problem, the meter may give too much weight to the shadow areas and the highlights will go too light (again, the histogram on the right end will have too much of the graph). In that case just do the opposite and take away some light using minus compensation. But again, unless you have a large shadow area, this isn't likely to happen.

In most cases I have a lot of faith in the matrix metering of my Nikon D90 and even in Tubac on a bright afternoon it provides great results. But like they say in the nuclear arms race: trust but verify. Unfortunately, we don't have a histogram to measure who is trying to fool us with their weapons caches! For a lot more about practical exposure options, check out my book Exposure Photo Workshop: Develop Your Digital Photography Talent. Shutterbug magazine called it, "...possibly the best book ever written on the topic." Nice folks!

Include Hands in Interesting Ways

A friend's hands can be very useful things to have "handy" when you're out photographing--they can help you carry gear, point to interesting subjects that you might have overlooked and, if you're lucky, maybe even scratch your back occasionally. But having an extra hand or two nearby can also be a useful creative addition to your compositions. Hands can be used to show comparisons of scale and texture, they can hold unusual objects in your compositions for you (a plastic alligator dangling over Times Square, perhaps) or maybe just to point to a real alligator sunning in nearby in a stream (hopefully not too nearby). Hands are interesting because they add a human element to any type of composition and again, in terms of both scale and texture, they can be extremely helpful. Using my friend's hand touching this giant saguaro, for example, provides a great sense of scale to the massive folds of the ancient cactus (probably 100 years old or more) and her thin delicate fingers provide a wonderful textural comparison to the rough, time-worn skin of the plant.

By the way, if you aren't lucky enough to have a cooperative friend with nice hands nearby, you can always use your own hands--just place your camera on a tripod, frame the scene and then use the self timer to get your hand(s) into position. Or, if you have long enough arms and a wide-angle lens, you can probably even just reach out into the scene and include your hand. I've photographed small stones and shells sitting in the palm of my hand this way and have even photographed a chipmunk feeding from my hand. But however you get a hand in the shot (and whosever hand it is), just be sure to frame the scene carefully so that people know you meant to include it and didn't just take a nap while you were composing the picture. You've got to hand it to hands--creatively and logistically, they're quite handy!

Plan a Desert Flower Trip

For some reason the desert is always described as an arid and lifeless environment. In reality though, nothing could be farther from the truth. In late winter and early spring, for instance, the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico are just exploding with beautiful displays of wildflowers and cactus blossoms.

Just how great the flower displays are in any given year depends largely on how wet the winter was: the more water the desert gets in winter, the better the flower displays. Timing is also crucially important and often just a few days can mean the difference between a spectacular display and one that's much less exciting. Late March and early April seem to be particularly good in southern Arizona (around the Tucson area), but again, it really depends on weather. There are a lot of online sources that update desert flower conditions on a day-to-day basis, so the best thing to do (especially if your travel plans are flexible) is to keep on eye on those sites and then try to guestimate when the peak time will occur.

One good place to start your research is the Desert USA site where you'll find up-to-date info on flowering conditions in Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas. There's no place quite as beautiful or as mysterious as the desert when it's in flower, so it's absolutely worth the effort it takes to get there!

Turn the Camera Vertical

Have you ever noticed that most of the photos that people shoot are taken horizontally? Even when the subjects themselves are vertical--things like trees and other people and tall buildings, people try to squeeze them into a horizontal format. In fact, one of the biggest complaints I hear from photo editors at magazines is that even though virtually all magazines are essentially vertical, photographers still shoot more horizontal images.

I think the real reason that most of us shoot so many photos horizontally is because that's how cameras are designed to be held and used. The viewfinder is on the top in the middle, the camera controls are (mostly) on the top of the camera and the LCD on digital cameras is horizontal. But that doesn't mean it's the best orientation in creative terms. Lots of subjects cry out to be framed vertically and they'll seem a lot more balanced and powerful if you let them proudly express their height. So next time you spot a subject that's taller than it is wide, turn the camera 90-degrees and see if things don't look more natural.

By the way, those two saguaro cactus shown here were photographed in Sabino Canyon in Tucson, Arizona and they're two of the most photographed cactus in the state. They look like pals posing for the camera!

Zoom in on Interesting Textures

Whether it’s the soft silky sheen of a baby’s fine hair or the rough bark of an old maple tree, lots of subjects have visually interesting textures. By using your zoom lens to close in on just the texture you’ll reveal a side of a subject that most people ignore. Textures are revealed best when the light scrapes across the surface of a subject, coming either from the side or behind the subject. Early morning and late afternoon are the best times to look for surface textures because that’s when the sun is low and skitters across the surface of the earth creating the shadows that reveal textures.