Alyza pt. 3 - Exposure

To a photographer, there is nothing more frustrating than taking a picture of scene and realizing that the highlights are completely blown out.

With todays modern smartphones, it’s pretty difficult to get a bad image in good lighting. Even in a scene with dark shadows and bright highlights, the iPhone can get you a fairly decent exposure, at the cost of a pretty flat image though.

So for today’s practice, Alyza and I went to California Botanic Garden. It’s a place we hadn’t been to since we came to take some photos of her and her mom 6 years ago. Because of that, she had an idea of what to expect to see here.

The temperature is changing and with it so is all the beautiful colors you find in nature. We were bound to get some really colorful photos today. The challenge here was going to find good compositions where the sky wouldn’t be blown out.

Most of the nice places here are shaded by trees and bushes so the cameras have to expose for the shadows, making the bright parts turn white from over exposure. That includes the sky.

We started off with a few goals. We wanted to take a photo of a squirrel, a butterfly and a red Rose.

With our tasks set, we began to explore.

Alyza started with her zoom lens to really pull in the faraway leaves. Shooting at f3.5 would push her ISO up a bit in the shaded areas, but the camera handles high ISO fairly well, so that shouldn’t be an issue. I explained to her how to look for things that stood out in the middle of all the chaos that the leaves and branches produce.

Light shining through the gaps in the trees would illuminate some leaves, so we focused on those first. We got some decent shots, specially with her long zoom lens.

We saw some turtles in a pond. They were super chill bathing in a bit of sun. We were able to get some shots of them.

She switched to her kit lens and I showed her how to properly shoot reflections from the water. You have to get low, close to the water to get the reflection properly. We took several photos and then took photos of some bright yellow leaves.

As soon as we stepped away from the shade, that's where everything changed, light was bad and things began to get over exposed. Colors didn’t render as colorful and deep anymore. I saw Alyza only took a few photos here before we moved to the next section so she knew it was bad lighting.

The next area had a tree that had fallen over. She decided to try to walk through it. Her first attempt was a fail because she couldn’t climb on to it. She approached for the other side and was able to finally do it.

We found some balls that the trees dropped. They were these huge seeds that littered the ground. We took some photos of that too. Using bokeh to isolate the seeds just like we practiced the previous time.

From there we found the gazebo and a small waterfall. We took a break and began to take photos there. We found a heart shape leaf and I took some photos of her holding it. There were yellow leaves everywhere. She began to take photos, still practicing her composition by shooting from different angles and perspective.

We saw a squirrel walking along a guard rail. I was too slow to take a photo of it but Alyza was fast enough to get a few photos of it. We stalked another squirrel along the road. That one was heading to its buried nuts. As soon as it dug them up, it ran.

By now the sun had began to drop and everything was mostly in shade, plus they were going to close soon too. We spent about 3 hours walking through the whole area taking photos of everything we could.

By the end I realized Alyza would frame her photos away from the sky and other bright areas of that were really bright. So practice today did help.

As for our mission, the only thing I was able to capture was a picture of blurry squirrel. Maybe I’ll try again next spring.