Blue with an Australian Summer Intensity

Summer is arriving at last, the hot weather part, and the sky has cleared to its intense blueness. This blue is not that easy to capture with a camera, especially a cameraphone. The problem being, for most of the day in Australia the clear sky will bleach out to white (being the highest intensity light (according to your light meter, when it compares the light to the foreground objects). There are some well established ways to get around this.

1. Use a polarizing filter, works well but these filters can be expensive
2. Expose for the sky, Point the camera high in the sky and half press the shutter release (this performs the exposure and auto-focus on most new digital cameras, set to green or Auto mode). Then pan down to your preferred picture view and press the shutter button all the way down. This keeps the exposure setting of the sky but on your new phone. Most probably you will have a nice sky but the foreground will be blocked out very dark, with little detail. Such dark silhouette can be dramatic but you probably wont be able to tell Arthur from Martha.
3. Use the HDR process to extend the dynamic range of your photo. If you look back through my post you will find this requires taking several exposure of the same image and then post processing these (using special software)

This photo series was taken at 3pm (2pm without daylight saving and about 7 hours before sunset) using the updated HDRCamera app on my android phone. The beauty of this application is that it automatically undertakes the post processing in your smart phone. Ok it does take a while, but the results are usually great, this image for example does captured that warmth and  intense of our summer sky nicely without making a silhouette of the gun tree.