I decided to play around with some natural lighting today. I’m not 100% pleased with the result, only because I didn’t have enough time and assistance to pay attention to the details I normally would. It’s a nice shot but the OCD monster inside of me is slightly irritated. Basically, I had a white backdrop in my backyard in full sunlight. I had my wife stand in for me while I set my exposure, focusing, and framed the shot on a tripod. I then took my spot in front of the camera with Zoe and had my wife hold a diffuser over us to soften the sun’s intensity and trigger the shutter via remote. The exposure turned out great but the diffuser wasn’t big enough to cover Zoe and I completely so a bit of my right arm was overexposed at the top. There was a small window of time that I could get away with keeping Zoe happy and smiling upside-down in the heat so between that and not being able to actually be behind the camera there were compromises. Still, it is a fairly nice picture.
The other problem I’m having is the compression noise in the white areas of the jpeg image when uploaded to the internet. These don’t appear on the original file, but showed up when I uploaded it to my website. If you click it again to full view the image the noise should go away. If anyone has any advice for me on how to get rid of this I’d be glad to hear it.
5D Mk III with Macro 100mm f/2.8L IS USM lens. ISO 100, f/4.0, 1/800 sec.