Why do your photos end up looking washed out and grey?

We’ve all done 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?

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 below 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 is probably a bit optimistic because sometimes the light only peaks for less than a minute! Standing outside when the light peaks, 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 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 is rising. Unfortunately, there are no guarantees. Cloud cover or haze can ruin the effect, but then sometimes you really do get lucky.

The shot above was taken in the Golden Hour in the late afternoon. Notice the rich, golden tones

The photo above was taken half an hour before
sunset. Compare it with the photo at right

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.

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:

1 — 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 readjust your polariser filter a lot more

2 — 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 wonderful 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).

And sometimes you just get lucky. When I saw the Crimson Rosella in the photo above-right, there was a hazard-reduction 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. I’ve done no image-editing trickery to change the colours in either of the photos above because I want you to see the difference good light can make.

Then there’s macro photography, where it’s likely your flash will overwhelm the surrounding light anyway. The photo of the bee shown below was taken only a few minutes before the Willie Wagtail shot at the top of this page, yet it doesn’t lack any of those 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.

Even the clouds which were a problem before, because they filled the scene with scattered, desaturated light, can become extremely useful 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.

Beginners’ series on
digital SLR photography

• A beginners’ guide — basics for digital SLRs
• Learning from examples — picking up where the first article left off
• Understanding histograms — making sense of this handy tool
• Preventing washed-out photos — why it happens, and how to prevent it
• Understanding Exposure Compensation — why your photo subject can look so badly exposed, and what to do about it
• Megapixels — how many is enough?

Photo Sales

• Photo Library — pics of Australian critters

An unhelpful guide

• Wildlife photography — this guide will not make you into a better photographer
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