Sunlight and Shadows

Must I say this photo a day project is very difficult, missed another day already! In any case, went on a fishing trip today to Chain Lakes. It is south of Calgary in the foot hills. Scenery was very awesome, reminded me of the English country side which is very beautiful.

Anyways, when we were leaving the lake at around 6:30pm I took this shot. It is hardly a good representation of the scenery around me but what interested me the most about this shot was the shadows intermixed with sunlight. I recently learned a technique to capture such shots from Photozone and it was very effective with this shot. With matrix metering, because of the fact that the camera takes the whole frame and analyzes it for 'correct' exposure, chances are the shadows will be over exposed. The same is true for centre weighted metering, which takes an average of the middle portion of the frame. Spot metering on the other hand lets you choose which area in the frame you want to meter for, such an option will allow you to correctly meter for shots with significant contrast between shadows and highlights. For this shot I metered for the lighter shadows (the shadows which aren't as dark).

The picture has been cropped to remove the unwanted road on the foreground.

18-70@ 70, 1/640, F9, ISO 200,