Advice on a pic please

[abijnk]

I took a trip to the San Diego zoo today and snapped this picture of one of the pandas. I am really disappointed with how the white on the bear turned out, but I am not sure what I should have done different. It was pretty much high noon at the time. I was standing on the path in shade, the panda was in full sunlight.

What should I have done differently? What editing can I do (all I have is iPhoto) to make it look a little better?

Thanks for your advice.

 

[TuffLuffJimmy]

The only thing I can think of would be to turn the exposure down, by speeding up the shutter speed, or decreasing the ISO, when you snap the picture. The background would be basically black, but the panda would look nice.

 

[abijnk]

The only thing I can think of would be to turn the exposure down, by speeding up the shutter speed, or decreasing the ISO, when you snap the picture. The background would be basically black, but the panda would look nice.

Thanks for the reply. I think the exposure is definitely a (big) part of it, but I'm not really sure if that would fix it all?

This one had is a little too, but only on the part of her face that was directly in the light. The rest of her face was on shade and turned out great.

 

[Westside guy]

With so much black in the frame, your camera's matrix metering did the best it could. Other than the head, the exposure doesn't look bad to my eye. Does iPhoto have a "highlight recovery" slider? If so, give that a try.

Really, with difficult exposures, IMO the best thing to do is probably turn on exposure bracketing, if your camera has that.

 

[TuffLuffJimmy]

maybe a polarized filter would work well to get rid of that 'glare' off the panda. I used one with my picture, but I don't think light was as big of an issue in my case since my baby panda was sleeping in a tree.

 

[anubis]

The scene has really high dynamic range... there isn't much you can do about that except for trying to a picture at a different time of day (which isn't always possible)

The picture would be really easy to fix in Lightroom, Photoshop, Aperture, or anything else that can do highlight recovery. It's probably impossible to fix in just iPhoto

 

[Col127]

maybe have used a wider aperture to blur out the background? i find there's too much going in in the pic since your subject is the panda... you can still save it by doing a mask in photoshop and then applying a blur. that could work too

I took a trip to the San Diego zoo today and snapped this picture of one of the pandas. I am really disappointed with how the white on the bear turned out, but I am not sure what I should have done different. It was pretty much high noon at the time. I was standing on the path in shade, the panda was in full sunlight.

What should I have done differently? What editing can I do (all I have is iPhoto) to make it look a little better?

Thanks for your advice.