Shooting Tip: Lighting Problems in Galle's Fishmarket

We have all visited a fish market at one time or another - our plan in Sri Lanka was to get to the early morning markets in Negombo after arriving the night before.

That plan failed because most of the fishermen in that part of Sri Lanka are Christian so, it being a Sunday, nothing was open.

We eventually found a much smaller local fish market in Galle, two hour's drive south of the capital. It was much smaller (than Negombo) and a bit late in the day (after 8:30) so half the stalls had already packed up - and by the smell pervading the beach along which the market was assembled, things were already going off.

Still, it was a great experience - photographically tough because: it's a busy place, the light was coming from behind the stall holders and of course, they were more interested in us buying fish, rather than posing for photos with fish.

Here's a small selection of snaps taken along the beach and some suggestions on how to deal with extreme back lighting...

Fishermen's nets litter the beaches up and down the coastal areas of Sri Lanka often making for a great shot, with and without the rubbish...

Angry Birds!

Shooting Tip: Lighting in a place such as this works against the photographer - you have to effectively shoot into the sun and, as it wasn't appropriate to start using flash (because it draws attention to what you are doing) the order of the day was to slightly over expose the file (shoot using an exposure compensation setting of around +1 stop) to try and retain a bit of detail in the darker tonal areas. Because of the extreme contrast this is never going to work very well - because you end up losing a lot of detail in the brighter areas of the sky. The banana prawns were going for $5 a kilo...

I usually bracket scenes like this (+/- 1.3 or 1.7 stops), because the light is very tricky and I might want a range of exposures to choose from later - or indeed, process a multi-file HDR picture.  On it's own, this two-stop underexposure frame is useless...

But then, if this dark underexposed frame is processed in either Camera RAW or, better still, an HDR app like Photomatix Pro or Aurora HDR Pro, you can reveal an astounding amount of detail in the shadows while holding the tones in the highlights - you can even get a blue-ish sky. 

I use Canon lenses and all of its (expensive) wide angle products seem to suffer really badly from Chromatic Aberration - a very noticeable colour fringing along areas of contrast in the frame - here it''s particularly noticeable between sky and the fish stall roof (previous version). Drop it into Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW to remove this and you get a significantly better, sharper-looking result.