(This post is written under the assumption that the photographer is not shooting in full Manual Mode)
Cloudy days can be a lot brighter than you think.
Instead of looking up at a blue sky, with the light source of the sun off to the side and therefore not bothering you much, when clouds are around the light gets diffused, spreading itself a lot more evenly.
This can benefit your photography tremendously, as it effectively eliminates the contrast between shady and sunny areas. Photographing on an overcast day can be fantastic.
However, when pointing your camera up towards the clouds – for instance when photographing a bird or a leopard in a tree – what will most likely happen is your camera will read the situation as being too bright, and try to compensate by underexposing, giving you a result like this:
The elements are there; you can see the leopards, you can get a read on the situation, but a lot of the detail has been lost in the most important areas.
Granted, the result your camera gives will depend on what metering mode you are shooting on. The two most well-used are evaluative metering and spot metering.
In Evaluative metering (most common), the camera takes 90% of the frame, analyses the amount of light available and adjusts the exposure accordingly. This is why in the bright situation like the one described above, the resulting image is likely to be too dark. The sky is sending a lot of light down, and the camera compensates.
The camera was calibrated in a studio somewhere. It doesn’t know that you are trying to photograph a leopard in a tree with a lot of light behind it. As a result, you need to tell the camera that you want to keep the picture bright.
This you do by controlling the exposure dial:
Understanding that the camera will want to darken the image, you need to tell it to do the converse, by overexposing. This means shifting the exposure setting to the right on the dial above. Exposure is measured in stops, which are divided into thirds. Overexposing by one or two thirds might be enough, but you might even have to go five or six up to get the exposure you are after:
As you can see, the sky is pretty blown out, with no detail of the clouds, but photography is about compromise a lot of the time, and the leopards are the subject, so need to be the priority.
Instead of instructing your camera to overexpose, you can change metering modes to spot metering. As the name suggests, the camera reads the light from a much smaller area of the frame (only about 10%), and adjusts the exposure accordingly. This means that if you have a lot of bright sky but only a small area of leopard, you can meter off the leopard to get the correct exposure. This is less likely to work in a photo like the one above, in which the light and dark areas are a bit all over the place, but it was very effective in the photo below, which was from the same sighting:
The above photo was taken using spot metering, which exposed for the cub in the foreground. On evaluative metering, I got a result like this:
Again, the essentials are still there. You can see the leopards, and the photo is technically usable, but the detail gets a little lost in the underexposed parts.
The concepts here can get a bit muddled when you first encounter them: when it’s bright you have to tell your camera to make it brighter, and when it’s dark you have to tell your camera to make it darker. Seems a little contradictory.
There’s a simpler way to think about it; imagine you are telling your camera what the conditions are… It can’t really think for itself when things get complicated, so you have to give it some simple instructions. When it’s bright, overexpose, when it’s dark, underexpose. Does that make a bit more sense?
If anything’s not clear, please feel free to leave questions in the comments section below…
Interesting and informative based on many years of experience. I can apply this same information to many other situations. Thank you
James, I went on a National Geographic trip in Antarctica – there several photographers there, and they told me same thing. That when it is sunny you step down 2 settings, and when it is cloudy you step up 2 settings. It worked perfectly! Thanks again for the reminder
THANK YOU! It seems counter intuitive to switch to spot metering and then over expose for bright conditions, but it works. I know from experience that in the excitement of spotting any animal in a unique or desirable position, one quickly sets fstop, shutter speed and iso, but forgets the metering button/exposure compensation dial….. sometimes it’s just good to be in the moment and leave your camera in your lap.
Thanks James! Sean Z was very helpful with this very situation and Day 2 photos were much better!
Great tips, thanks for sharing!
Excellent information and advice, James. Your explaination was clear. Good teaching!
Thanks Joanne!
James, That is a great tip and we will give it a try. We usually use the exposure dial with pretty good luck, but changing the metering might make a big difference from what we saw in your images. Thanks!
Hi Micheal,
It’s much of a muchness really. Both methods are very effective and usually just need a little tweaking to dial the settings in properly…
Photographing a leopard in a tree (Phil’s version). Step 1: Have a camera card inserted with 500+ photos available. Step 2: Snap photo after photo after photo. Never mind if you use up several hundred photos because while it may be cheating, the wonderful age of digital photography ensures you will get two or three dozen money shots. Step 3: Imagine every single way you can photograph the treed leopard and take multiples of each idea. Again, repetition is your friend. Step 4: Sometime after half an hour with leopard, silly season will set in. Don’t forget to take selfie with leopard in background….style points if leopard is yawning. Step 5: By now you’ve shot up half a camera card on the treed leopard and finally you can allow for a little patience. In my experience, nothing beats the leopard looking directly at you, so wait for the look and be ready to snap. Yawns are also your friend (you can tell friends and colleagues back home that the leopard was sawing angrily and they won’t no the distance. Just kidding. You really should follow James’ advice as his years of leopard viewing far exceed my snapshot of leopard viewing on a couple visits.
Hahaha Phil you should print your own manual! Are you sure 500 photos on the memory card is enough…? 😉
Literally took 400+ of Mashaba female sharing a treed impala kill with her daughter the now Ximungwe female May 2016.
James…good stuff as usual. I take another approach which has worked out well..I use a flash with flash extender (originally a Better Beamer, but more recently, Mag Mod system). The only drawback I have found is the time it takes to sometimes get the extender in position..so, I mostly just keep the flash and extender in place in backlit or dark shadow or early am/late pm situations. Keep up good work…we always enjoy your entries. Looking forward to meeting you some day…BTW, I use a Canon 1Dx with 100-400..bigger lens (600) is just too unwieldy for me. J
Good advice! One of my mentor’s once said to me that if I was shooting anything with lots of sky behind or beach or snow, then I needed to override the camera’s automatic assumptions for exposure by “adding light” (+) to avoid silhouetting the subject. And conversely, if the subject was brightly spotlighted against a dark background, then I needed to “subtract light” (-) to balance out the picture. Not sure if this helps but it’s just another take on the problem. Most folks don’t realize that cameras CAN be fooled despite being marketed as completely “automatic”. Unfortunately, Londolozi is almost continually bathed in bright light but fortunately most of the safari critters are on the ground!!!
I never used the exposure dial and photographing birds in a tree proved to be difficult. Never got a good result. Last year in Kgalagadi someone showed me how to use the exposure disl and since tgen my photos are much better.
Thank you for this post, it was very helpful!