Sunny but soft
QI took some pictures on my telephoto shooting directly into the sun, but the results look soft. Is this normal? Teddy Prentice
AIf you are shooting directly into strong light, it’s bound to have an effect on the look of your image – after all, that’s why you are shooting with the light in front of you rather than behind you. It’s adding atmosphere and an element of the unexpected into the results.
Shooting ‘contre jour’ is always trickier, as there’s a lot of light flooding directly through the lens and bouncing around the lens elements before it even reaches the sensor, so exposures can be more hit-and-miss. The result can be flare, a loss of contrast, and an apparent drop in sharpness, as well as the potential for over- or underexposure.
It is possible to miss sharp focus, since the AF system needs contrast to identify the subject and lock the focus. But more often than not, the softness you’re describing is just loss of edge definition that our eyes then perceive as lack of focus. Sometimes this can be artistically pleasing; at other times, you might want to add some contrast back into the image just to give it that edge definition again.
If you look at the untouched raw image of the two horses, you can see that it looks slightly soft, whereas the processed image – which has had a little extra Contrast and Clarity added – looks sharper because the shapes are clearer. In truth, no extra sharpness has been applied because it didn’t need it.