Exposure: 1/5000 sec
Aperture: f/3.5
Focal Length: 28 mm
ISO Speed: 200

I’m going to try something a little different today and do a comparison between two shots of the same thing. The comparison shot is…. a chapel! As you can see, this first shot has a lot of sunlight at the top of the picture; there is way too much, in my opinion. Interestingly, this is despite using the highest shutter speed available to my camera (1/5000 of a second). Even opening for that short of an amount of time, my camera still was able to pick up too much light. If you guessed that this is because of the aperture size, you’d be correct. When outside during a sunny day, you should always change the aperture size to control light rather than the shutter speed. With an aperture opening as big as f/3.5, you’re probably always going to end up with a lot of light hitting the lens, especially when angling upwards toward the sun. So what should be done about this picture? I could either set my camera’s mode dial to A and change the aperture whilst letting my camera handle the shutter speed, or I could be adventurous and set it to M and change both the aperture and shutter speed manually. I believe what I did was the former, and the result was this:

Exposure: 0.002 sec (1/640)
Aperture: f/13
Focal Length: 28 mm
ISO Speed: 200

Now that the aperture opening is down to f/13, this shot is definitely darker. My camera set the shutter speed to 1/640, which also probably helped. Unfortunately, there still seems to be quite a bit of light in the upper left. Due to the change already taking place on the chapel itself, I fear that further changes in the aperture opening size would darken the shadows around the chapel before the amount of light in the upper left was actually lowered enough. In this situation, your best bet would be to wait a few minutes in hopes that a cloud will pass between you and the sun, and do your best to make that cloud look fantastic with the light behind it. Another good idea could be to simply come back later when the sun is lower and closer to the horizon so that it’s not right behind the chapel as it is in my pictures (I was a very impatient boy). The former would give a very interesting sky, and the latter could cast oranges and reds across the chapel that could be depicted very beautifully. Both are good ideas that would give very different photographs.