The painted desert
A vivid colour palette helps this reader rise up to the challenge of shooting under a midday sun
Our reader Shari Barker
TThe day was full of white beaches, red rocks and deep blue skies, plus this lone tree standing out on the cliff. The colours were so brilliant that I wanted to capture them to remember the amazing natural colours of the landscape that we were experiencing. This was taken at midday, as we were only in this area for a few hours during our travels. It was taken with my Pentax K70 using an exposure of 1/200 sec at f/14 and ISO 200.
I also used a polariser to enhance the blue sky.
Our expert Andrew James
The reason we generally favour low-light landscapes is for the softer light and the way low sunlight helps to accentuate the shapes and textures of the natural world. But you are right, Shari: it’s still possible to shoot at midday, and you’ve produced a highly colourful and saturated image.
The foreground area is slightly overexposed. You could have used a neutral-density grad filter upsidedown to reduce the exposure on this, the brightest part of the scene, or simply dialled in some negative exposure compensation, then lightened the top half of the image in post-processing.
Looking at your scene, I think a better option would have been to move closer to the tree and use just those wonderful orange hues as your foreground, leading up to the tree and then that punchy sky above. In other words, simplify the composition.