Shoot Mid-day, Yes, Yes you can!
Anyone that’s been into photography knows, one of the most taught rules is “Never shoot in the middle of the day”. Even Scott Kelby during a The Grid broadcast a couple months ago during the “Live Critique” show that got a lot of buzz said so. To Paraphrase him. ” If you are a landscape shooter, there are two times a day to shoot. Other than that forget it”. And to directly quote him, talking about shooting during Golden Hours. ” That is the absolute most basic thing” , And, “If you don’t do that, you can throw it in the trash”
Rutt rowww…Mr. Kelby, Did you just tell me I can’t do something? Not a good thing to do to this dawg.
But of course he is right and it also extends to portrait/wedding photographers and others. He’s right…well maybe he was right.
So why do we not shoot during the Mid-day? Well, the light is harsh, shadows are in the wrong place, colors are bad and I’m sure we could state a few more things and I guess we would be right.
But I’m going to say. We’re not.
Case in point. Saturday I took a drive down PCH ( Pacific Coast Highway) on a simply beautiful day. I pulled off in Cardiff by the Sea in one of the few remaining parking spaces that was left because it was such a beautiful summer day. It was about 1:30PM, certainly not a time of day we would shoot.
I got out, grabbed my camera and headed to the water. It was spectacular, the sky was a beautiful deep blue with white puffy clouds, the water a beautiful seafoam green. The sand a warm golden tone and the kelp washed ashore a sparkling emerald green. Wow how wonderful.
Snap went the shutter.
And I got this:
OK Mr. Kelby you’re right. I can’t shoot Mid-Day. The light is harsh, the color is bad, it’s all washed out. The dynamic range is multiplied by the specular highlights off water which can drive meters batty. It’s just an ugly day with bad light…Hey wait a minute! I’m standing here looking at it…
Umm…no it’s NOT. It’s FRIGGEN beautiful out!
So is the light really bad? Or, can our camera, as we knew them, just not capture it?
A flawed system
No matter what we may think, now or years ago. Digital or Film. Small formats or big honking 8 x 10 Large format. Cameras are a flawed system. They just are. They don’t see as well as our eyes and when you really consider that our “Human” camera is a system of both Lens (our eyes) and our mind that make up that system. They don’t even come close.
In fact our mind plays a huge role in how we see. Without our mind’s interaction, everything we see would be upside down and backwards. Our mind corrects for our eyes, the lens. We even use composition to do what our mind does naturally.
As a photographer, what can make us great or better than another photographer is knowing these flaws and how best to correct or compensate for them. It is, in some ways, what made Ansel Adam’s so great. Besides a great eye for light, composition and quite frankly shooting places that not many people could see without his photographs at the time. Mr. Adams knew and understood the flaws of his camera and film. It was the basis for his Zone System. It what made him know to expose a certain way, then process another and develop this way. To get the most out of a system he knew very well and knew if he didn’t do this he could not recreate in art what his eyes saw.
Getting back to my day at the beach
What my eyes actually saw was this:
Brought to you courtesy of…yes…HDR. High Dynamic Range Imagery.
So the “Rule” of photography of not shooting mid-day is not one brought about by our subject and “Bad Light” but it really was brought about by a flawed system that just wasn’t capable of capturing the light that was there. And while our lenses do a pretty good job of replicating our eyes, the sensor somewhat less as far as dynamic range goes. But the part that really is missing is that our camera is incapable of the manipulation our mind adds to this of putting together the range of luminance and color and in some ways boosting the midtones into the scene at an acceptable and pleasing level (The “Two Looks” theory).
Now don’t get me wrong, The Golden Hours are still an amazing time to shoot, as can be the Blue Hours (You forgot them Mr. Kelby) And I am not saying that HDR can make up for truly bad lighting situations. I still maintain it must be great light. In fact I will say that part of the day usually is not the best time to shoot. The 2 or 3 hour period leading up to the Golden hour when the haze and pollution in the sky increases. The angle of the sun is just in a bad sometimes in those hours. What I AM saying is. Look, Look around, does it look nice to your eyes? Then we should be able to capture that and HDR may allow us to do that or at least do that more often.
The truth is there are times that it is just is better to shoot mid-day.
What to shoot Mid-Day
A few examples of things that may be better shot Mid-day: Well we have the beach scenes that we already talked about. Think about the above scenes with a colorful umbrella in the image or children’s sand pails at the waters edge. Just be careful of specular highlights on the water. Take them into consideration when metering the scene. Remember what a specular highlight is; it is a reflection and in this case it is a refection of the sun which can be many times brighter than our ambient EV15 light of a typical sunny day.
Shooting in Canyon Areas or close to a mountain range. When you are close to a mountain range that the sun sets or rises over. You really can’t wait for the Golden Hour. In fact the sun may set behind them a good two hours before civil sunset.
Shooting in Slot Canyons can be even worse. There may only be a short window of time that a great shot is possible in slot canyons and the dynamic range can really be high from the interiors to the sky. Waiting till too late in the day can really yield some really poor results as was shown in this article I wrote last year.Wildflowers: This is one that really needs consideration. One of the reasons we sometimes can’t shoot wildflowers during Golden hours is that a lot of flowers have not yet opened or start to close during that period. (Some flowers also close when it is windy and winds can increase towards sunset) And there are times shooting huge fields of wildflowers just looks great in the middle of a beautiful blue sky day.
But shooting wildflowers in the middle of the day do pose a couple problems. Ome that isn’t instantly recognizable if we do our usual HDR routine of measuring the Dynamic Range or brightness of the scene. At first with measuring the scene it may appear that it isn’t even that high of dynamic range. But our meters do get fooled with this and it’s one time we may be better off taking a shot and looking at our RGB histogram. One color channel usually blows out.
Red Channel Blowout and Flower movement are a problem in this image
Most often, especially with, red, orange, Yellow flowers, it is the red channel. So shooting HDR helps with keeping this channel under control and giving us a much sharper image than a standard one because just like when we blow out all channels (white) it causes a great loss in detail.
But there is something that does get in our way of shooting flower fields with HDR. Movement. Even with a subtle breeze wildflowers move, sometimes they simply vibrate but that causes more loss of detail and sharpness. It makes it difficult enough with a single image because we have to keep the Shutter speed up to stop the motion. I often end up shooting at a higher ISO because even though there may be bright sun, using f/16 for my aperture yields a 1/100 shutter speed and I need much more.
Now, consider that, plus now you want to do multiple exposures? I think not. So this is an instance where I will recommend a single exposure but then using some of the tools we have with HDR and doing a Single Image, Tone Mapped.
Single Image Tone Mapped Shot 12:24PM
No it is not a true HDR but what we are instead doing is something I alluded to earlier. How the mind puts together an image sometimes more so than the eye and we can simulate this by using tone-mapping to bring down the highlights till they fit and don’t blow out and then boosting the mid-range that our eye/brain combo gets so right but our cameras, as we knew them, get so wrong.
So get out there and experiment, try, look around. How do the conditions appear to your eye? If it looks nice, maybe it is nice. Maybe we just didn’t have the tools we needed before. But with HDR we do. I’m not sure that people yet understand the power that HDR enables us. Once we understand that as well as we did the limitations of our system, we may be quite limitless.
And images like this are possible. Okay Mr. Kelby, anything else you would like to tell me I can’t do?
Shot 3:55PM
Hope that helps,
PT
PS For you portrait shooters, did you know it’s possible to shoot mid-day too? Not HDR but there are ways that you too can overcome the limitations of our flawed system have. Ask me.
