RAW & Well Done

You may ask yourself, "How can something be RAW and well done?"  In this case, we're talking about photography (although I guess we could be talking about food, too, especially smoothies, but that's a topic for another day).

Specifically, I'm talking about all those images posted to social media that would have looked great if they had been exposed properly (you know....well done!).  And even if not exposed properly, but were shot in your camera's RAW mode, they might be recoverable with editing software.  Of course, much better if exposed properly to start with.

How can you do that if you're shooting in the midday sun?  One way is to move to the shade of a building or tree or any other object that will block the sun.  If that is not possible, you can use a fill flash to fill in the harsh shadows, if you have it available and you are close enough for it to work.  If none of the above is an option, get a close-up light reading of the subjects, and shoot in manual mode with those settings.  What will also help if you don't have a manual mode is getting much closer to your subjects to eliminate as much background as possible.  If you are aiming your camera directly at the subject, then changing your metering mode to spot or center weighted will give you more accurate results.

Why are you getting all those dark faces to begin with?  Your camera's metering mode is set to average so everything in the photos is being averaged for the light.  For example, in the photos below, the first one was shot with the camera aimed at the clouds, and the people are too dark.

If I had aimed at the people the clouds would be too light.

In the bottom two photos, I briefly played around with the editing software (Lightroom) to balance the two.  The photo was originally shot in RAW mode.  

The same kinds of things happen with focus - if you're not aiming at the subject, the subject will be out of focus.  Unless you first focused on the subject and kept the shutter release button pressed halfway down.  Or you used a wide angle lens with a small f-stop (then almost everything will be in focus).

For the above photo, I exposed for the players and didn't worry about the sky, so it was pretty blown out.  I had the sun behind them to avoid harsh shadows on their faces and also so they wouldn't be squinting more than they are.  Even though the sky still affected the exposure a little, I shot in RAW and fixed that with editing software.

The moral of this post is that if you understand why your photos are coming out too dark or light or out of focus, you can make adjustments and get some nice photos.

NOTE:  There are a lot of things I didn't cover here, but hopefully enough to you can get better results.