DPP-Part 2; Exercise 2

Exercise; Highlight clipping

For this exercise, I had to take a photograph on a sunny day, so that I would produce an image with very high contrast, so to develop strength in highlight clipping.

Highlight clipping is when you compose a photograph, so that it has not got a wide range of brightness and appears with much contrast, then looks over exposed in one area and to dark in another, this is called ‘roll-off’ and this kind of image is almost always to be avoided .

When you take an image, the camera doesn’t read that image the way your eyes do, this exercise will help develop the skills to ensure this does not happen in the future, by showing what happens when you take a photograph.

After I found what photo would be good for this exercise, I had to find the exposure setting that highlight clipping would only just appear on my camera, this function is available in the display of the camera, once the photo has been taken.

For the purpose of this exercise, no post production is to be done on the image and I am only shooting in JPEG.

I had the camera on the manual setting, so that I could keep the shutter speed the same, but change the aperture. I then had to take the same image, with 5 different f-stops

 
First image;

1; 1/160 seconds at f/11

 

This image was just on the cusp of the overexposure warning on the cameras LCD screen.

 

 

Second image;

2; 1/160 seconds at f/9.0

I then had to put the aperture up by 1 f-stop, therefore increasing the highlight in the image.

 

 

Third image;

3; 1/160 seconds at f/13.0

 

For this Image, I had to go down an f-stop from the original position, to make the image darker.

 

 

Fourth image;

4; 1/160 seconds at f/14.0

For this Image, I had to go down an f-stop from the last photo, to make the image darker.

 

Fifth image;

5; 1/160 seconds at f/16.0

For this Image, again, I had to go down an f-stop from the last photo, to make the image even darker.

After taking these images, I put them side by side and magnified each highlighter area. Here are the differences that I could see, with regards to the following aspects;-

Completely lost areas of visual information

On examination, when I magnified the image I found the clouds were lost, with the more light I let in on to the image sensor, alas, after I had changed the settings, the cloud had gone. Obviously, the more light you let in the more the image is washed out and over exposed; this didn’t seem to happen in the latter images.

A visible break in the form of an edge between nearly white and total white

This only seemed to be apparent on the first image, where there was only a bit of over exposure; I think that it may have to do with the cloud or the appearance of the sky. On consideration, I can see it in the second image, again, due to exposing the sensor to more light.

A colour cast along a fringe bordering the clipped white highlight

The boarders with the higher f-stops, seemed to be washed out, like it was moulding in to the back of the sky, there was a purplish tint on the fringes of the tree. With the darker images, there was a bit of a tint but it was bluer and not as strong in colour or size.

The colour saturation

As I predicted, the colour is washed out in the first images and richer on the latter, I think that it makes a massive amount of different to the saturation of the image. I think the image with the best colour and closest to how the colours looked, is the third image. I think it’s really interesting, how a slight alteration of the aperture can alter everything. In the darker images, the colour is more defined and pleasing to the eye; however, the shadows make the fifth image, to much of a gloomy scene.