How To Get Detail In Your Shadow Areas Outdoors

How To Get Detail In Your Shadow Areas Outdoors

by William Lulow

The last article talked about using a “fill-in” light as a second light source. The purpose of this kind of light is to add detail where there otherwise would be shadow and in the case of the lighting that the sun creates, possibly very dark shadows.

With many scenic images, obviously you can’t just add light but you can alter your exposures to obtain detail in the shadow areas. So here is my technique:

For this street scene in Coimbra, Portugal, I first saw the possibilities of the composition with the stone street, the stone walls, the roof tops, doorways and, of course the crisp sunlight. A good exposure contains detail in the highlights as well as in the shadows. Ansel Adams used to talk about the “Zone System” as a way of making sure that detail was maintained throughout all the “zones” of a Black&White image. One did this by “placing” the elements of the photograph on a particular zone (Zone # through Zone#7), and then developing the film to correspond with those zones. In other words, sometimes the zones would need to be expanded by either shorter or longer development times. Remember back in those days, B&W film was most easily processed by the photographer and so these elements could be controlled fairly closely. Now when we used to work with negatives (film), we had to remember that the dark parts were really the highlights and the clearer parts were the shadows. So, you could readily see if there was any detail in the clearer parts of the negative that would translate to shadows in the print and extend the development to bring them out, or shorten the development to make them darker.

These days, of course, we have Adobe Photoshop. But even with this sophisticated software it is sometimes difficult to to render detail when there is none or very little. So the best way to make sure you have all your exposure values covered is to make very detailed ones in the camera using the camera’s light meter or a handheld one.

What I did with this shot was to use my camera’s meter. I physically walked up to the wall that was in shadow and took a reading, making note of what it was. Then I did the same thing for the wall that was bathed in sunlight. I then walked back to my original point of composition and made three exposures, one with the needle pointing to about 2/3 of a stop overexposed and another about 2/3 of a stop underexposed, and the third one with the needle right in the center. I always figure that even up to two stops either way can be corrected in Photoshop. Much more than that and the image tends to get too contrasty and then there is not much you can do to correct it satisfactorily. For this image, I actually used the image that was a bit overexposed and altered it a bit in Photoshop. I was able to maintain enough detail in both the highlights and the shadows to make this image a good example of how to make a successful exposure.

Here is another image where I had the same approach, technique and result:

In this image, I was trying to capture the splashing of the waves and I wanted the bridge and the foreground to be mostly in silhouette because everyone can recognize the iconic shaped and know exactly what bridge this is. But look at the detail in the water, the splash and, of course the sky. That’s where I wanted the attention focused. Here, the technique was similar. I took my meter reading from the water itself and tried to make that Zone III or so because I am not that fussy about which zones I use. I have sometimes called my method a “Modified Zone System because I go for the part of the image I want to have the most detail and put that on Zone IV and then let the other parts of the image fall on whatever zones they may, knowing that I can probably alter them somewhat in Photoshop.

So, Zone System exposures are usually for Black & White images, but the same techniques can be used when shooting color landscapes as well. Keep in mind that it’s the thought process that’s really responsible for getting really well-exposed images.