Photographers, Technical Help?

I have took a photograph with my minolta 7000 film camera using ISO 200 Fuji film and I need your help.

http://i30.tinypic.com/30ayzxu.jpg

do you feel there are some over exposed areas in this picture If yes what should had I done to make it perfect.

I am talking about photography techniques

Yes, as you say you have some spreading white point areas - but it's a difficult / high contrast shot and you were only 1/2 a stop out!

One way to overcome this would to meter the highlight, so you have an accurate reading for your image white point. On colour negative this should read no more than 2.25 stops brighter than the mid tone (the camera setting) if you are to retain detail in this extreme area...

You have a 4.5 stop 'exposure latitude' on C41 colour negative film - the range between the black and white points - so your grey / mid tone needs to sit at the mid point typically (though in some circumstances the rule can be broken and you can use dodging or burning, or manipulate the exposure for example).

This is because the information you print needs to ultimately fit into a 3.5 stop 'print window'... hence the need to occasionally dodge or burn.

To make images that will print 'as is' - straight through the print window - you need to meter accurately, recognise when some areas will be out of range, and thus make decisions about which area of the image is most important to your overall result, if you are to avoid 'clipping' the image tonality.

On neg film, unlike tranny, you also need to meter for the shadow areas, not the highlights - which it looks like you did accurately in this case, so this issue is basically down to those high contrast areas being out of normal printing range... so this is one example where you probably ought to have manipulated the exposure very slightly to compensate. (If you're aware of the issue you can spot this during shooting and pick a different angle or move your subject.)

A spot meter, incident light meter and a grey card may be of use - so may hand printing or scanning + photoshop manipulation in your post production...

These burned out image areas will be redeemable if the information is on your neg and you are willing to hand print them in... my bet is that you probably DO have this information on the neg... ;)

I think it needs to be a bit brighter. But you can photoshop it.

I dont feel the overexposed bits but I do see them.

You could use the burn tool in say photoshop to darken where the sunlight is direct on the subjects hair and midrift.

If a reshoot is possible use a difusser to kill the highlights. So to make that shoot "perfect" a large difusser to the right of the subject would have been the answer.

No, its not too bad. If you are hand printing in the darkroom, all I could suggest is burning the hair a bit. You want your viewers eyes to go to the middle of the picture, which should be the lightest part. with this, my eye, personally, went straight to this hair where the light is hitting it. Overall it is a well taken photo with equal amounts of darks and lights.

Other than moving the subject more into the shadow I am not sure you could have done much in this situation. If you had an assistant with you you could have blocked some of the sun.

I think it's beautifully composed. My suggestions have to do with toning down the highlights in the hair and the chest areas. The strength of this portrait is the eyes, and I would like them to be the focal point. The highlights can fade quite a bit.

Hope you'll post any revision!

Being a film camera (and I assume negative film)--if you had the photo custom printed--they might have dodged the part(s) that were too bright, and burned the part(s) that were too dark. But I think it's a beautiful photo in its own way already.

Short form, it's a very nice picture, but about 1 stop overexposed for the skin tones. The highlights do not need to be burned in, but the shot can stand some cropping to bring the focus more forcefully to the eyes.

People get a little too concerned with the existence of 'burned' out highlights as if they were the absolute arbiter of whether an image is good or not. In your image, they don't detract and don't contain any information that is needed. If you had metered to hold the highlights, you would have moved the skin tones way into the darks. This doesn't seem to be an open shade shot, so the lighting ratio is higher than it would be otherwise.

I darkened you image about 1 stop and cropped to put more emphasis on the eyes. I didn't worry about the burned out highlights.

http://picasaweb.google.com/Vance.Lear/L...

Pay a little more attention to in camera cropping and where you want your important tones to land. You did a good shot.

In film, the dynamic range is about 1.8 - 2.0 at printing if you were to use slides. Velvia 100 is a good way to start.. if you would like to retain all the details in these high dynamic range shots, then you would have to underexpose it by 0.5 - 0.66 stops. With normal development, you would then cut a template out to dodge the under-exposed areas when hand printing or do it in photoshop.

remember, you can push under-exposures and still retain detail but you cannot retrieve detail from what is already burnt out in over-exposure.