fluid stone

Another one from Japan, at the main Jodo Shinshu temple in Kyoto.

This was a tough one to get correctly exposed, and I still didn't really do that the way I wanted to.  Clouds are always hard anyway--they need a ridiculous range of black and white and my camera just can't get there.  If I got the highlights bright enough, I lost all detail in the clouds and the sky, but if I got the clouds the way I wanted them, the underside of the fountain on the left and the temple on the right would be completely dark.  As it is the highlights aren't that blown out, but the picture is a wee bit underexposed.

Incidentally, I just learned how to use my camera's histogram and what light meters are for; usually I just shoot on manual and judge from the back of the camera how I should expose the shot.  What a histogram tells you is how much darkness and lightness is in your photograph.  Light meters, back in the day where you couldn't immediately check your photo digitally, would tell you at which exposure you'd get your photo to be a "medium" value of dark/light, if you averaged out all the pixels.  When you're looking at a scene like this one, which has very dark shadows, intermediate values, and then very light highlights, you probably want a balanced histogram.

How do I use this?  I'm embarrassed to say, not very much (now I just know what it's for, not really how to employ that knowledge).  I usually check to make sure my highlights aren't getting washed out, which sometimes can be hard on the LCD screen.  I just look and make sure the histogram isn't mashed up against the right side, which means not too many pixels are at the maximum lightness that my camera can see.