Help, with Burnt out sky please.

Help, with Burnt out sky please.
When photographing fungi I often find that getting the best shooting angle for the subject content, necessitates facing pale sky in autumn when woodland is bare of colourful foliage and yet the subject is ill lit because of it's woodlands habitat;. this results in burnt out and painful backgrounds such as my shot of two Panaeolus Papilionaceus recently uploaded to the 'Gallery'. What can I do to reduce this problem at the time of shooting, are there magic lens filters that I can use to give the bare but relatively bright sky a bit of colour? The only filters that I have used before have been Sky Lite/UV filters; as lens front element protection. Advice would be most welcome.
Photon

Changing the viewpoint to remove the bright sky would be my preferred option. If the viewpoint is unavoidable how about using a reflector or card as a background?

There are centre spot filters with a clear centre and darker surround, but to be honest it's easier to think about adjusting the composition to suit.

take what you like about that shot (nice by the way) and recreat it when the sky is a little darker or with lights you can control.. perhaps a hdr image when the sky is darker..

one eg:
highspeed sync flash.... one flash with shoot through umbrella behind your subject, one flash infront both off camera both set to HS mode to use a fast enough shutter speed to bring down the ambient sky...

another eg:

Powerful strobes that give you a small enough aperture to bring down the sky to within range of your shutter sync speed...

plus what george said...
add your own background or scrim...
also photoshop... use threshhold filter create a layer mask then fill in the sky....
lastly there is a graduated nd filter and reflector combo to bring down the highlights and fill in the foreground.

Set the exposure compensation to -1 1/2 to 2, and use fill in flash. That will solve the problem.

AWSOME! Occams Razor in action!

Perhaps try HDR as well?

It would be nice to know what that means.

The simplest answer is usually the right answer.

I'd suggest trying your 100mm lens, which will make it easier to simplify your composition, and you'll be able to pick a better background. The problem with reducing the exposure and using fill flash will be that you'd end up with very dark trees and a brighter foreground, which wouldn't necessarily look any better.

Even something like a 300mm lens can be very useful with fungi:



K10D, DA*300mm, 1.5s @ f/9.5, ISO100, tripod, polariser and reflector.

Dan

Thanks, Don. French guys don't know everything.

All said.

Thank you all very much for your helpful advice it has been much appreciated, I will endeavor to put these methods into practice on my next woodland Fungi Safari, I hope that there are still some fungi around.
Thanks again,
Regards Photon

Hi Photon

If you have Adobe Camera Raw CS4 you can add a digital graduated filter to any part of the image. Set the filter location, orientation and size then freely adjust exposure, brightness, contrast, Saturation, colour, clarity and sharpness.

But it's so much easier to get it right in camera from the start.

Well, I think this is an example of how my software skills outweigh my photographic skills