The photo came out fine, albeit perhaps a little dark for my taste. Just out of curiosity, why did you use such a high shutter speed with ISO 1600? Also, did you adjust levels, brightness, and contrast?.

Don't panic about your first photos not living up to your expectations. The learning curve indeed is steep..

Jerry..

It looks like it has either been processed by a very extreme tone curve ( dark and bright areas over "enhanced" ) and it may have been over-exposed to begin with ( hard to tell )..

I'd guess the environment was pretty harshly lit high up and quite dark lower, so the camera's metering system probably blew some highlights but could still not save the darker areas. That's not exactly anyone's fault, and I'd wonder if any camera would do a great job. Even a manual exposure would yield mixed results..

That kind of situation screams out for RAW and "expose to the right" techniques. This helps you keep the highlights and enhance the dark areas to produce a more balanced scene..

I'd guess that B&W would exagerate the darkening and lightening as you're loosing colour detail the eye/brain can use to construct a scene with..

Having said all that the image itself has an oddly appealing character on first glance, so composition is probably good. It's not until you start wondering about the dark and light areas that it looks odd. Many people won't even see that..

StephenG.

Pentax K100DFuji S5200Fuji E900PCLinuxOS..

Not bad, what it lacks is some focus which is largely due to an out of focus person and a very white sky. I think that this was in matrix metering. Center would have brought out the person more..

As pointed out, iso 1600, f13 and 1/400 doesn't make that much sense. Drop that iso to 800 or 400..

You may want to spend a bit of time learning about aperture and shutter speed.Don't wait for the Nikon D-whatever, have fun now!http://www.flickr.com/photos/j_wijnands/..

I can't see the photo(it's blocked here at work) to make a call on this particular image..

Wouldn't "expose to the right" blow out more highlights if you're already blowing them somewhat? It would help with the shadows, but if you need your highlights for important stuff then doing that could be a problem..

Of course, if it was blown by over-processing then slight overexposure would have helped greatly if you don't blow them with the initial exposure.'Be right, fearless, faithfull, and true to others...'T.S. Elliott..

I like it!Shot against the light and moody. Great picture!.

It reminds me of the black & white shots in books of classic photography. I'd be happy if it was one of mine...

In the old days...when I used to stay up most of the night in my dark room making prints (before the chemicals went bad...lol) I'd likely have dodged the sky with a piece of cardboard in order to reduce the exposure on that part of the photo. You might try highlighting the lightest areas of the image in photoshop with the magic wand, then select the inverse before working on the levels etc. to retain more detail in the lightest part of the photo. I often do that with wedding dresses as they're so much lighter than the rest of the photo...Duncan Bristowhttp://www.pbase.com/duncanbristow..

Meaning exposing so that you don't over-expose but the histogram is as far to the right as possible. Of course you cannot always do this, but if you want highlight detail that's what you need to do..

The idea is that recovering highlights is very hard, even with RAW, whereas recovering shadows is, by comparison, not difficult. Recovering highlights is more prone to false colours ( e.g. pale pink skies ), although that's less important if you're building a B&W image..

StephenG.

Pentax K100DFuji S5200Fuji E900PCLinuxOS..

Sjgcit wrote:.

That kind of situation screams out for RAW ....

And HDR or Digital Blending: either creating multiple exposures via bracketing at the time of capture or creating multiple RAW conversions - one each for the highlight area, shadow area, and mid-tone area - and combining into one image..

Good Day,Roonal.

'Money doesn't buy happiness, but it makes for an extravagant depression' by golf tournament sportscaster..

I finally got to see the picture..

I understand what exposing to the right is, but look at this. It's already lost highlights. If this is the standard exposure, the best bet would have been to shoot underexposed, preserving the highlights after this shot and blend the two together..

The idea of "Expose to the right" assumes you can keep your highlights. In this shot, the dynamic range is either simply too much for a camera to capture, or it's been post-processed to the extremes. No way to keep those highlights if this is a normal exposure..

Shooting to the right here would give more detail to the alley, but the buildings are already toast. They'd be phantoms at that point.'Be right, fearless, faithfull, and true to others...'T.S. Elliott..