Why is the contrast in this picture so brutal? Is it only because of the lighting?
I took the picture with my Canon A1 through a Canon FD 1:4 70-210mm lens on CinestillXX film with ISO 400. I used a pretty small aperture because I had the setting sun on 10 o’clock. (The wind turbines in the back are about 4,5km away, the Minion less than 500m)
Yeah, pretty much. If you want less contrast, take the same picture at multiple exposures and combine them I’m post to create an HDR image.
Thank you, this seems to be a good idea for digital photography. But I don’t want to do that, because shooting multiple exposures on film is a bit too expensive for me.
Cameras don’t have the same dynamic range capabilities as our eyes. This is especially true when the end result is a JPG (even if you start from a RAW file). Reduced dynamic range means that details get lost in shadow, or they get lost in bright white blow out, when our eyes would still be able to make details out in that same situation.
So when you shoot a dark subject with a bright background like you’ve got here, you’ve got the two extremes, bright and shadow, and that’s where your important details are, and because of the reduced dynamic range, the contrast appears even stronger than it does to the naked eye, and details get lost.
Assuming you can’t reframe, or reshoot, and you have to work with what you’ve got, you’ve got two real options.
If you shot in 10 or 12 bit RAW, you could convert the file to a HDR capable image format. That will save more details, however most browsers, apps and monitors won’t be able to display that image, or if they do, they’ll display it incorrectly.
Otherwise, you can do something called “tone mapping”. This allows you to take a high dynamic range image and compress and remap that range in to a lower bit depth dynamic range. Basically it uses an algorithm to shift the tonal range of the image to fit within the range available to it, artificially altering the tone (brightness) of the image to make the details more visible. So your window sky will appear less bright than it was, and your shadows will appear brighter than they actually were. Sometimes this looks weird and unnatural, but for an image like yours, it would work well, especially given the monochrome colours. Typically you would do this starting with a RAW file (ideally a 10 or 12 bit RAW file) and end up with an 8 bit JPG.
If you do have the option to reshoot, then you can do what is called “exposure stacking”. You shoot multiple images of the same scene, under exposing some, over exposing some with photos covering the exposure values in between. This ensures that you have images exposed well for the bright parts, the dark parts and everything in between. Then you composite them in your image editor. You’re still using tone mapping to remap the final tonal range in to the range available within your JPG, but you get better results than working from a single file.
Thanks to your answer I understand a little bit better how to make use of different formats and techniques.
Thank you for that! But since I only shoot analogue, there’s a lot in your answer I can’t put to use. Since the sky is completely white anyway, could it be a solution to use a longer time so more light from the shadows gets to the film? Or will this fuck up the contrast completely?
That can work, but the bright area starts leech in to the dark areas.
If you’re looking for an analogue solution, your best bet is a graduated neutral density filter. It’s pretty much designed for this exact scenario. It’s a filter that sits on your lens. Half of it is grey (like sunglasses, but without impacting the colour tone) and half of it is clear. You can rotate it around and align it with the light/dark boundary in your subject. It will reduce the light from the bright area of your subject, whilst leaving the dark part of your subject unaltered. This will let you expose longer for the shadows without blowing out your skies.
Your subject is mostly in the shadow and you shoot it against a bright sky. That generates a lot of contrast.
