Hazy day question for you pros

I took the new camera out today to the cliffs over at Torrey Pines. It was a hazy day, and some of the shots were taken back towards the glare of the sky. Is there any way to help the lighting of the picture come out a little less bright in the sky, and keep the color of the cilffs?

I am going to take a class during the summer, but I am trying to learn as much as I can before then.

Lets see the photo.

Here you go

Took the same view in B/W. Any thoughts?

You had some pretty funky settings on that pic.
ISO 400
SS 4000
AP 3.5

Try to keep your ISO as low as possible and go from there. There's really no reason to shoot this shot @ ISO 400 and 4000 shutter speed. You could of come down to ISO 100 and brought your shutter speed down appropriately according to your light meter.

Anyways,
The problem is you can't expose the foreground properly without blowing out the sky or if you expose the sky right the foreground will be underexposed. There are times that you can help this with fill flash but this shot isn't one of them.

The only other options that I can think of would be to take three different raw shots and do a HD shot in photomatrix or photoshop.

You might be able to bring back some of the highlights in photoshop by making a copy in layers and merge two shots also.

here's a example of what you could do with it in photoshop.

I took your photo and made a copy of it in photoshop layers. On the copy I tried to bring out the sky but in the process the foreground gets to dark so I then erased that part before I flattened the two together.

Here is the layer that I tried to bring the sky back.


This is where I started to erase the dark layer to bring back the foreground. I left some of the dark layer for you to see what's going on.


Keep in mind that was a down and dirty job and it could of been made much better.

i'm not as advanced w/ ps as walt, so this is the best i could do. bumped up the saturation, adjusted levels and curves, and voila'.

Ok, I need to dive into the programs now. I had no idea you could change these pictures that easily. Coming from a 35mm, this should be a lot more fun.

If you have Photoshop CS3, you will also have the "Open As..." function, where you can open a JPEG as a RAW file... Doing this I cahnged exposure down to -3, to properly expose the sky, then bumped "Fill Light" all the way up, to expose the foreground... While this is a less ideal way to do it compared to doing a few exposures and combining, it's not a bad "after thought" solution...

Mind you using a resolution original such as here will show up JPEG artifacts, seen in my example...

I do believe the camera has a setting to automatically correct for major contrast changes. I know my Nikon D300 does.

That would be a good candidate for HDR.

I wonder how long it will be before DSLRs have smart highlite/shadow processing built right into them (No offense Peter but I don't think the D300 is capable of what Walt/Joe have done above)

Fred Miranda's Velvia Vision plug in for CS3 will do a number on a shot like that as well.

Rich, I have not really played with the feature yet, as I only just got my camera. Here is what Nikon has to say about it. It is called Active D-lighting.
http://www.nikonimaging.com/global/products/d300/expression/page4.htm

A split nd filter will also help here.

It would be cool to see shots with and without that feature turned on. Now that I think about it my 1DmkIII has a similar feature designed to hold highlites in wedding dresses but I don't think it will deal with extreme contrast differences like those above.