Christian Photographers Community

I took some more pictures of the flowers my dad planted. So I thought I'd share them with you.

Hi Scotty...

Some nice flowers in the garden.

Were you taking them in bright sunshine?  The second one especially looks "blown".

Pat is right, the second one as well as the 4th one is very blown and if you tried printing, would not do well.  With the b&w rose picture I would crop the right hand side a bit to get rid of the distraction of the buds there. 

What do you mean by "blown"?

Like this, Ellette

yes...can you see how that brings the attention more onto the one rose?  I like it.

Oh, and blown means that your highlights are completely white and your camera doesn't see any information there at all.  If you print it you'll have absolutely nothing printing there.  You want to have some information/detail in your highlights and your lowlights.

Ok, thank you.

Thank you Elette.  That is constructive information.  Now the next question is how do you get that information to the camera?  Would you use filters?

Scotty I do like the cropped rose.  It is well defined.  I wondered about the others though.  You are doing well and have a lot of teachers here. 

Judy, one of the best ways to make sure you don't blow your highlights is to look at the histogram on your camera.  It also helps to know what your camera sees when it looks at something, and how to get the right exposure.  Unfortunately, it isn't really something you can explain in one little post.  I'll just go with the histogram here though...if you look at your histogram (only on digital cameras obviously) after you've taken a picture and see a spike to the far right that means you've blown your highlights.  If you are trying to do a high key picture, you may want that, but on the whole you never want a spike to the far right...and usually it is best not to have one to the far left either which means you have a pure black with no depth of detail in it.  I'd rather have the spike to the far left than the far right though, if I had to pick one.