The sun is out and you have bright blue skies over head, the perfect weather to take some photos of the kids? Not necessarily! Cameras (film & digital) can have great difficulties in bright light conditions. A roll of film and a digital sensor both interpret the light that they recieve and tend to show extreme bright light as white light and completely void of detail, in strong sunlight this normally results in heavily overexposed images and will normally ruin a photo completely! This can be depressing as you may have missed the 'perfect' image.
If you are in bright sunlight and decide to take some photos there are some very simple rules to follow to ensur you have a few 'keepers';
* Try to take photos before or after mid-day - when the sun is directly overhead it is also at its brightest
* Morning or late afternoon photography is best also as it creates interesting colours and shadows
* When taking a photo try to place the sun behind you, this will greatly reduce the chances of having the photo overexposed. This should also light the subject perfectly
* Unless you are comfortable with the manual settings on a digital camera (compact or dSLR) use one of the automatic settings, the camera will then expose the image as best it can. If you are taking a landscape shot, then use the 'Landscape' setting, if you are taking a macro shot then use the 'Macro setting etc...
* Use the sun in your image, the first image to the left was taken on Chapmans Peak in Cape Town, South Africa and was taken looking directly at the sun. The settings were input manually with a very small apeture (f/16) and an exposure time of 1/800 of a second with the ISO set to 100. The colours where then slightly tweaked in Photoshop to bring the blue out a little more and the clouds.
Please remember that it is dangerous to look directly at the sun and extreme caution should be used if a shot like this is attempted
* Experiment as much as possible! If you have a digital camera you should be able to see the photos on the LCD screen and make a decision if the image will work or not with the lighting
* The second image on this page while technically overexposed came out well and when printed looked even better
http://www.print-digital.info/articles/summer-photography.html
