It was very windy today at the lake so, I figured, why not take a photo of my lunch? Here is the process I used:

This first shot is of my lunch, but, it doesn’t tell the story since there is no lake in evidence. It is however not too out of control as far as a lunch goes. It’s a 10 inch sub with lots of lettuce and veggies, and a healthy apple along with my diet soda. At least there is no big ole bag of chips there instead of the apple.

This shot shows the lake, but the food is too dark because the settings are best for the lake, which was in full sun and the food was in partial shade.

When I set up for the car, the lake got blown out (turned white) since the shutter had to be open too long in order to capture the dark interior.

The best solution when there are dark areas and white areas might be to use fill flash. Fill flash fills in the dark areas when there are a lot of bright areas in the shot. Now there are no shadows across the bag or food and you can see the spillway from the lake behind. Fill flash is the tool pros use when taking photographs with the sun behind the subject. Set the flash for a few stops below the measured value and you get nice shadow free eyes and a clear background, and much better looking shots!

I didn’t notice the shadow on theright side of the image when I took the shot. I did notice the glare on the apple from the on camera flash. I would have been able to fix the shot using my off camera flash, but that would have been a lot more work and risked draggin my camera bag through open food. Plus, I was hungry!