Sunday afternoon field hockey game at the beautiful UMaine field. Unfortunately it was a noon game with blazing sun which challenges any sensors dynamic range. To deal with this, I do one of two things. I either use 1. exposure compensation in camera to expose for the players faces or 2. I will leave not worry about shadows on faces and pull up the shadows in post production. How do I decide which approach to use? A few things. If I am exposing for the faces in camera, I must accept that highlights will be blown out and unrecoverable so if the final usage is print, I need to decide if I can get away with that. On the other hand, if I am pulling up the shadows in post, I need to be ready for some unwanted noise in those areas. So... if I can get the ISO down to 100 while keeping the shutter speed I need AND I don't mind the post processing work, I have more latitude by using a regular exposure and protecting the highlights. If I am not shooting at ISO 100 or I don't want to mess around with post processing, I am better off exposing for the faces in camera and calling it good.
Here are some shots from today, All at ISO 100, shutter speed of 1/800 and an F stop of 3.2. The ISO of 100 is very forgiving when you start recovering shadows. The F stop of 3.2 isolates the subjects well and keeps my shutter speed up. The shutter of 1/800 is just enough to get sharp images. You can see the motion blur in the stick and ball of the second shot...which I like. So with those parameters, I went with letting the shadows get heavy on their faces (the team was a bit backlit) and I fixed it in post. Each image takes less than a minute to process when you have done it a lot but even that adds up if you do a lot of them.
Click on the Images to see them Larger Please
This one had minimal tweaking in ACR. The new interface with PS CS6 is great. Highlight and Whites slider down about 25 each to save the highlights, then push the shadows in PS with a curves layer.
Lifted in post. A quick job using ACR and then curves
Another shot with shadows recovered in ACR and curves in Photoshop
