Digital SLR photography — Why do your photos end up looking washed out and grey?
We’ve all experienced it: taken photos in beautiful surroundings on a delightful sunny day, only to be disappointed to find the pictures you end up with have all the colour leeched out of them. What’s going wrong, and how do you prevent it?
Yuck! The harsh desaturated midday light has washed most of the colour out of this photo of a Willie Wagtail.
Time of the day
Sunlight has a harsh, desaturated look about it in the middle of the day, and things tends to only get worse as you get more and more clouds in the sky. To be honest, a few clouds can actually help a photo, by scattering some much-needed light into the shadows, but too many clouds combined with midday light will all too often result in a washed-out shot like the Willie Wagtail photo above.
You might be thinking I’m exaggerating. I mean, things might have looked great to your eyes when you took that photo in the middle of the day. But to understand what’s going on you have to pause for a moment to think about how your eyes (and brain) work.
If you stand in a room lit only by an incandescent bulb your eyes quickly become adjusted to the yellowish lighting, to the point where you don’t even notice the yellow tone in everything. Your camera will notice though, and faithfully record everything with a yellow tinge (unless you correct your white balance settings). This same tendency for the eyes to ‘adjust’ means we often don’t notice just how desaturated and bad the colours can be in the middle of a bright, sunny day. But your camera will record things exactly as they are.
So the first thing you want to keep in mind is the time of day you take your shots.
Why is the middle of the day so tricky for photography?
In the hours near midday, the sun is high in the sky and therefore its light travels through less atmosphere to reach you than if it was low above the horizon. The diagram above shows what I’m talking about.
Now compare that with the first hour of sunlight in the morning or the last in the evening, which I’ve drawn in the next picture, below. You’ll see that, at those times the light has to travel through a lot more atmosphere before it reaches you. That atmosphere has lots of tiny particles of dust, or even smog in it, and they infuse the light with the kind of warm, golden tones missing from your midday shots.
The Golden Hour
Photographers sometimes refer to the last hour of sunlight in the evening, and the first hour of sunlight in the morning, as the golden hour. The word ‘hour’ in Golden Hour should not be taken too literally because sometimes the really good light only lasts for a few minutes.
Taken in the middle of the day, this photo came out so desaturated it could almost pass for a black and white shot
This Darter was photographed in exactly the same place as the seagull shot above. The only difference? This shot was taken during the hour before sunset. No image manipulation was needed to get these strong colours — this is how the photo looked straight out of the camera
Standing outside when the light is at its most saturated in colour, the most wonderful, magical thing happens. Colours start reaching beautiful levels of intensity, with reds and yellows appearing to glow from within, and the camera obediently takes it all in.
Suddenly you’re getting the kinds of colours the professionals get in their postcard shots. To make things even better, the sunlight will be hitting your subject front-on or from the side, instead of from above. Harsh shadows are replaced with rich colours.
To take advantage of this kind of light you ideally need to be in position, all set up
and ready for your shots before the light reaches its peak. Professional photographers often
get up at dark, so they can be ready outdoors in their pre-arranged spot as the sun rises.
Unfortunately, there are no guarantees. Cloud cover or haze can ruin the effect, but then
sometimes you really do get lucky.
Polarising filters
If you must work in the brightest hours of the day, you’ll be grateful for a trick that cuts back on the glare and restores some welcome colour to the skies: using a polarising filter.
Midday lighting sucked the warm tones out of this building but at least my polarising filter put some good colour into the sky. Like the other examples on this page, this image did not require any digital manipulation to achieve that colour
Polarising filters don’t cost nearly as much as a lens, but they can help your middle-of-the-day shots a whole lot.
They enhance the ability to see into water (by cutting down the glare on the water surface), darken skies (while keeping the clouds white) and reduce the amount of reflected glare bouncing off surfaces like foliage. The result of all that is more colour in your photos.
With autofocus digital SLRs the type of polarising filter you’ll need is a Circular Polarising filter.
When you’re using a polarising there are a couple of other things you need to know:
- You need to rotate the filter on your lens to find the most effective angle. So for example, if the end of your lens rotates as you zoom then you’ll need to keep adjusting your polariser filter a lot more
- If you want to darken the sky, the polarising filter is most effective when you are facing in a direction that’s 90 degrees from the sun. So if you’re facing the sun, or have the sun directly behind you, the effect won’t be noticeable.
Too many clouds
A few small clouds in the sky can help a shot by scattering light into the shadows, preventing them from being too dark. But too many clouds can cause your shots to lose colour.
I won’t go into the science, but let’s just say that if the sky is full of clouds then a lot of the rich colours will disappear from your shots. That’s not always a bad thing though, because clouds can add drama to a picture, and sunlight peeking through a gap in the clouds after rain can sometimes produce amazing lighting.
Is midday photography a lost cause?
No! There are plenty of great shots possible at all hours of the day (and night), and of course there are always polarising filters (mentioned above).
A nearby bushfire caused the sunlight to take on a rich, orange colour, which allowed me to get good colour into this picture of a Crimson Rosella
And sometimes you just get lucky. When I saw the Crimson Rosella in the photo at right there was a hazard-reduction bush fire burning in the bush a few kilometers away. The sky was full of smoke, which softened the light and gave it a rich, yellow-orange tone similar to the Golden Hour. All I had to do was wait for the bird to jump out of the shadows and into a spot illuminated by that light. Once again, I’ve done no image-editing trickery to change the colours in this photo because I want you to see the difference good light can make.
Taken in the middle of the day, this macro photo received all the saturated light it needed from the flash
And then there’s macro photography, where it’s likely your flash will overwhelm the surrounding light anyway. The photo of the bee shown at right was taken only a few minutes before the Willie Wagtail shot at the top of this page, yet it doesn’t lack the warm tones.
As for photography other than macro, professional photographers use all sorts of tricks to restore the warm tones in the middle of the day. For example they might use large sheets of shiny gold foil to reflect warm light onto their subjects. Or they will put yellow gels over their flash for the same reason. A yellow wall or rock face can also cast warming tones onto a subject. If you look around and be a bit resourceful there is nothing stopping you from getting better colour into your shots in most situations.
In the middle of a bright, cloudless day, shadows can be extremely harsh, as in this example. A few small clouds in the sky would have improved this shot a little by scattering some much-needed light into those dark areas. Once again, I could have improved the look of this picture using image-editing software, but I want you to better see what your camera has to deal with. In my experience, the best shots often require the least amount of work in the image-editing software afterwards so it really is best to get things as right as possible at the moment you take the photo.
Even the clouds which were a problem before, because they filled the scene with scattered, desaturated light, can become extremely useful to the professionals by faithfully filling shadow areas with ambient light. You see, the trick with photography is to work with light and the pros understand this really well.
Another potential trap with midday photography: exposure settings going wrong
Hey, I could fill a whole page about just this subject. So I did.
