Blown Highlights - OK or not?

Excellent work DOIK.

Really? Look, I mean no disrespect to DOIKs efforts at all, they are remarkable in their own right and certainly show more skill with certain aspects of PP than I possess. I'll be the first to admit I'm a beginner. However, to my mind he hasn't demonstrated that the blown highlights in this image can be rescued as what he has done is essentially used a mirror image of the detailed side of the face to fill in the other side.

There are several reasons I don't particularly like this approach (for this particularly image, away) and wouldn't use it here myself if I had all the PP skills in the world.

Firstly the subject's makeup was far from symmetrical (I have other shots showing this clearly, they're just not as good in other ways... mostly because there were so many people milling around it was very hard to get this guy against a 'clean' background). Therefore, why would I want to represent it that way? One poster mentioned the makeup is less interesting because you can't see the detail - to my mind it's even less interesting still if it's just a copy of what you can already see.

Secondly, one reason I liked this shot is that I felt his expression had character... but of course his facial expression is not symmetrical either and making it so only drains much of the character from it. It makes him look 'kinda goofy' for want of a better description.

Thirdly, the light falling on his shoulders and upper torso now clearly doesn't match the light falling on his face, which makes the whole thing look a touch unnatural to my mind.

Fourthly, his 'messy hair' and beard has basically become a mirror image on either side too, which only compounds the effect of making him look unnatural.

Yes, the job DOIK has done is very good in it's own way, but it's also very obvious on any kind of close inspection and I still prefer the original, blown highlights and all. No doubt it could be improved upon further in terms of modifying the lighting etc. with further effort, but I suspect the 'mirror image makeup and expression' effect would still put me off and lead me to prefer the original.

For the curious, here is a shot which shows what his makeup looked like. It has not had any PP whatsoever other than a resize for the purpose of uploading.

[IMG]http://i1204.photobucket.com/albums/bb411/msitaylor/MakeupR.jpg[/IMG]

How do you have it set up?

Not sure what you mean, but I just dial it in using the exposure compensation control. As the setting is persistent I don't have to change the setting until the situation changes.

Apologies, Mark, I wasn't having a go at your PP skills, and hadn't spotted how DOIK had achieved that result. However, I still would not class this picture as "creative use of blown highlights". It just looks wrong to my eyes, more especially as it obscures some interesting detail.

I'm meaning the basic things like centre weighted/matrix/spot metering for example which may tell quite a lot. As a general observation, it would really help to leave the EXIF data intact when asking for help.

Reflected light metering is fundamentally flawed as a system but we all do rely on it a lot of the time. You have a very dark subject against a dark background so your only choice is to meter for the brightly lit part and try to lift the shadows later. The camera is lifting the whole scene to an average value. This isn't a quirk of the camera but just a photographic reality.

In these tricky situations you have to use some kind of fill light to reduce the contrast, move the subject into better lighting or walk away.

That's okay. I didn't really see it as a creative use myself as the time. The subject was addressing the audience (really an ad-hoc crowd of whoever happened to be around) 'ringmaster style' so he was pacing back and forth a lot, and I was rapidly moving about to try to get some different angles. Trying to get him against anything even vaguely resembling a clean background was proving particularly difficult. I failed to compensate for the light when I got to that particular viewpoint.

However, on looking at the image afterwards I found myself quite liking the effect. Though I find the blown out parts of his ear and beard a little annoying, I quite liked the contrast between one side of his face and the other and the way you can only partially see what the makeup looks like on the blown side. That's a very personal thing. I've always quite liked images that leave a certain amount to the imagination. I quite like the mystique of it all.

Of course, that is an extremely personal and subjective thing, as we are (not unexpectedly) finding out in this thread.

I find myself using multi metering most of the time, center-weighted sometimes depending on the situation, and spot metering only rarely. It's an approach that works most of the time as long as I have the time to think about it.

In a rapidly changing situation where I'm tying to react quickly to what's going on I often find myself not thinking about it sufficiently and therefore not making the necessary adjustments. I put this down to lack of experience really - the more I'm aware of it and the more practice I get the more I will learn to think on my feet and act accordingly.

I appreciate what you say about exif data, but in this case wasn't really asking for help as such, more just acting on an interest about people's opinions on what seems to be quite a divisive subject. In exposure terms I know exactly what I did wrong in the above photograph and I understand the technical aspects of exposure quite well, it's just applying them in practice I often have difficulty with because 'thinking on my feet' is not a strong point.

Now here's creative use of blown highlights..I came across this in the gallery, I hope Lowela does't mind me putting it here....

I like it.