A tricky shot to succeed. The great difficulty here is that you are looking into the sun and so you have an extremely broad dynamic range to expose correctly. As human beings, with our eyes connected to our brains, we manage to see the highlights and lowlights at the same time because our brain corrects an image that our eyes have seen through pupils with their very powerful aperture. Even the most modern reflex cameras cannot record the vast range of light that nature offers us and so we have a recurring problem of either well exposed dark shades with the highlights burned out, or well exposed highlights with all the dark areas too dark. Here you have tried to find a compromise but the result is that exposure is wrong in both the high and low lights. There are basically two ways around this. The modern, digital way “HDR†(High Dynamic Range) where you photograph the same scene with various exposures so as to be able to choose the correct exposure from the different frames and make one final image with those on the computer… or the traditional way (get the photo right in the field with just one shot) with the clever use of neutral density grad filters. The choice is yours, both techniques are largely accepted today. I personally enjoy the challenge of getting it right as a photographer and so invariably use the filters.
Judges Comment