Replacing 'lost' colour

17th September 2012, 22:32

Regularly browse this section but have never posted before

Had a really busy weekend there with the camera, Leuchars Air Show was on saturday and spent sunday at Knockhill for the Scottish French Car Show. Plenty excuse to use my 70-300mm lens for the first time.

The weather at knockhill was pretty dire so had no problems with light there but at Leuchars it was a different story... The runway is pretty much east/west facing and at the air show you're positioned on the North side of the runway. On a gorgeous day, like it was yesterday this is a bit of a pain for newbies with cameras

I'd read up that using shutter speed priority (TV mode on my Canon) was best for moving objects that i'd be shooting this weekend. Problem is that facing into the sun has meant that most times when the picture is bright enough to show the north facing part of the plane, the sky is washed out

These pictures aren't edited to show what I'm on about, also the reason that they're quite big. Seem to have some variation

Is there a way to give the sky some colour again? Or is that just unavoidable and you pick the best?

Plane is a bit dark in places or just me?

About right

Washed out sky

Ground and plane are fine but 'lost' sky again

Sky has colour but plane is too dark

Nice balance imo

18th September 2012, 01:22

Sometime it's hard to have both good, when contrast is big. You need to decide what's more important to you, in this case, do you want right exposure of airplane or a back. If airplane is more important, than use spot light metering and put "spot" on airplane. If airplane is not in shadow and you shoot RAW, later you can process image and it's easy to darken background. If you shot usualy sky on sunny day, you could buy CPL filter, it really helps sometimes and give nice color to sky.