Just took some pics of my friend and her 2 kids this weekend. There is too much shadow in the pics. It was early morning. I just bought the Canon Eos 10d and Canon EX550 flash. The flash did flash but did not fill in the shadow.

Any advice would be much appreciated:
a) what to do in future shooting situations like this, and
b) can I fix this in Photoshop Elements

I am a beginner (obviously).

Picture is attached (hopefully).

Jewel

Jewel, no piccie. Perhaps the shot is too large to attach. Did you wait and see if the attachment was successful?

If the attachment worked, you should see this message:





If the attachment's too big, you should see a message similar to this, instead.

Hi Jewel,

Welcome. A lot of it has to do with which part of image you metered. If you are metering off the bright sunlight, the shadows will be very dark. If you meter off the shadows, the light parts will be blown out.

You might want to play with partial metering and exposure lock (check your manual).

fish

Okay, got picture attached. This is not the worst one, but still shows some shadow problems I had. Flash did not fill in the shadows.

Jewel

Fish,
Okay, thanks for the suggestion. Ya, I think part of the problem is that it was early morning and I had a lot of light coming in on the right side.

I just thought the flash would "fill" in more shadow.

I have a couple more pictures that were taken in the shade and the light filtering through shows up in "blotches" basically.

Jewel

Jewel, one other thing you can try is bumping up the flash compensation by 1/2 stop or so.

It's hard to shoot something in direct sunlight, for the reasons that you've demonstrated.

Patch29 (a pro around here) likens digital cameras to shooting with slide film - not a lot of range, easy to blow out the highlights. It would be interesting to see if Fishy's suggestion, metering for a midpoint between shadow and sunlight, works.

For what it's worth, Zero-Zero (yet another pro around here!) suggests shooting in the shade. The shade on a sunny day gives pretty nice, even lighting. Dunno if the trees in the background provided enough complete (as opposed to patchy) shade to make that possible. I've made the patchy shade mistake many times - looks awful!

I don't think Photoshop can help you. There are a number of places where the lighting is pure white. The side of the boy's head, for example, parts of the mother's face, the bottom part of her shirt, maybe even the daughter's arm, her hair. I don't think you can recover from that. There's no detail left to capture. Everytime I try, it turns gray.

Nice shot, tho - good looking looking family.

Hey Jewel, If I was to repeat that exact shot I would use my hand held light meter to help me. From the meter the numbers I would start with are as follows: shutter speed of 1/200 which is the sync speed for your flash, an aperture of f/11 and an ISO speed of 50. These numbers are for direct sunlight, no clouds.

I would try using a fill or slave flash to take out the shadows. I use a cheapy flash on pod for fill and metering is always a nice way to go. This may help pull out some of those nasty outside shadowing problems.