Hi! I am Janine, and I am with Pangolin Photo Safaris on the Chobe River today.
We have got an amazing subject grazing outside of the water. A hippo,
together with his little Egret friend. I want to try and get the exposure as
correct as possible.
All right, let's have a look at him. We see the hippo out of the water.
Quite unusual. We get it a lot on the Chobe, but it's not their normal behaviour.
Normally, they are nocturnal animals, so it is amazing to see the entire animal
outside of the water. The hippo also has a bit of bird life moving
around him, that benefits from him grazing, because he's chasing up the
insects, and they get a lovely little 'high tea' alongside the hippo. Let's give
it a try. If I look at the hippo he's got a beautiful grey tone, so I would keep my
exposure roughly around zero. He is not too fast. We are shooting on a nice steady
shutter speed. However, if I look at our Egret, the Egret is blindingly white in this
photograph. Very difficult to expose for both subjects correctly at the same time.
So, you are gonna have to decide. Is it the hippo you want to focus on, or the
Egret. Similar situation with wedding photography. Is the bride or the groom more important?
Easy question to answer. Not so easy with our subject. On zero, let's try and
give it a shot with the hippo. He has a little Egret moving around his face.
Let's have a look...yeah, that's a really nice perfect exposure for the hippo.
But you'll see highlight alerts in the Egret. If you want to see the
Egret in more detail, you're going to have to under expose the photograph. I'm
going to try minus one.
It's always nice if the Egret actually is facing the hippo. Almost like the two
are looking at each other. Yeah, no more highlight alerts for Egret,
but our hippo has turned out very very dark.
Given that the hippo is a much bigger subject in our photograph, I would focus
on the hippo. I think it's the prettier photograph, and just deal with the
highlight alerts of the Egret. In post-production we can fix it a little bit....
Hi! I am Janine. I am with Pangolin Photo Safaris, in our editing suite in the Pangolin Chobe Hotel.
Earlier this morning, we were trying to shoot a hippo
on land, that was chomping away happily, together with his Egret friend.
We were struggling with the exposure. I would like to show you in post production, what we can
do with these pictures. Let's get started. All right, if you have a look at this
photograph. This was one of the two photographs that I took this morning. We
shot it a little bit brighter to get the exposure for the hippo right, and then we
shot it a little bit darker, to get the exposure for the Egret right. What would
be the best way to shoot? Well if we look at the brighter shot here together,
you'll see very quickly that this Egret is completely burned. You will see in the
histogram you have a little bit of a peak on the right hand side. If I
hover my mouse over the neck of the Egret, you will see that the numbers
underneath the histogram come pretty close to 100. We pretty much lost our Egret.
So if I go ahead and edit this...even if I pull my whites all the way
back, we could maybe save him all the way down on the left hand side. You will
see we don't want to see any whites when I pull the whites back - while I press my
ALT key. There we go...here he vanishes...and we don't want to see any blacks within
our hippo, so I want to slide my black slider so far to the left that I don't
see any blacks. In theory that is supposed to be a perfect exposure. You will
see that there is still a little bit of a peak on the right hand side. Maybe by
taking my highlights to the left, I can get a little
bit more out of my Egret. Let's zoom in. There we go. We start seeing patterns of
feather's within the Egret. He is still fairly bright in comparison, so you see
we do struggle to retrieve the white colours back, but we are getting better.
You can take the overall exposure down just a little bit, and there we go.
The hippo hasn't changed much, but we've got a lot more information out of the Egret
that is standing next to him. For the finished edit, we shouldn't forget to
sharpen. I always mask my image when I sharpen, so I don't sharpen the
entire surface area, affecting pixelation and grain and the surface. I only
sharpen the corners. Let's have a look together at the darker
photograph. Looking at the darker image you'll see (yes) the hippo is way too dark.
However, zooming in on our Egret we have all the information we want in our little
Egret friend. Our feathers are clearly visible all throughout the Egret. I am
going go back here to the original image that I had imported. You will see I
don't have to pull the whites back as much. I actually have to pull them to the
right this time, instead of to the left, so that we don't have any white
clippings. I am going to have to pull the blacks to the right this time as well -
and not to the left, in order to get rid of any blacks. There we go. I am going take a
little bit of the shadows out, so that our hippo becomes a little bit more visible.
Even though it is dark overall, I am going bring the highlights
back in, so our Egrets feathers are becoming visible. You will see overall
this is a much darker image in comparison to our first image. I am going
to compare the two with each other. Let's have a look. We are going compare
r against a and pull that picture back in. Drag and drop. There we go. We are going
compare r against a, and you will see that the first image is still quite a
bit brighter than our second image. I still find that our hippo is a little
bit too dark in comparison to our first image, however we see our Egret a lot
better. So if we want to edit our active image a little bit more, I would take the
exposure up a little bit. Double-check that you don't have any whites showing.
We don't know any white clippings because you don't want to lose the Egret.
There we go. Now these two look a lot more like each other than at the
beginning. In general (for us), it is a lot easier to bring a dark image back to the
bright colours. Once this white on the left is completely burnt, it doesn't
matter how far to the left you pull your white slider, the information is gone.
So, unless you shoot on a very high ISO - where grain is a problem - try and shoot a
little bit darker, so you don't burn any highlights. However, if you do happen to
shoot on extremely high ISO, making your image brighter will show all
the grain in your photograph. So, in that instance - and that particular instance - I
would try and shoot a little bit brighter. You see post-production helps us a lot
in getting the two subjects much closer to a real exposure. Almost like we're
looking at it with two different eyes. With our two eyes we can layer images
over each other, and the hippo neither looks too dark, nor does the Egret look
too bright. Post-production helps us with that.
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Goodbye!