5D Mk IV – EF 70-200mm L II – 1/125, f/4.5, ISO 100, CWA Metering

I had an opportunity to capture the elusive Mia today while napping on her homemade bed. It’s always a challenge when you are trying to shoot when there is strong backlight, and you are not wanting a silhouette, and you are not using a flash or strobe. In this case, I didn’t use any external lighting, it was strictly Mother Nature coming in the window. To make matters worse, it was high noon which is usually the worst lighting. If I exposed on Mia, the light from outside would be overblown. If I exposed for outside, Mia would be a silhouette.

Using a flash would be the ideal solution in this case. This also happens to be a hard concept for new photographers to understand. ‘Use the shutter to control the ambient exposure, and use the aperture to control the flash exposure.’ Now, since I didn’t use a flash, I’ll table this concept for now. It has given me the idea that this would make for an ideal Photo of the Day in the future.

Well, back to Mia. Since I didn’t have a flash handy (Mia likes to move at the often), I set my shutter speed to 125 and ISO to 100, and set my aperture to f/4.5. I exposed for halfway between Mia’s head and the window. After a practice shot, I switched the metering mode and settled on Center-Weighted Average. The Photo of the Day did require some additional post-processing. I had to drop the highlights/whites, and make the blacks/shadows less pronounced to a degree.

Mia is the Photo of the Day. She’s a cutie. Hard to believe she’s 15.