How to shoot for highlights?

[Mark C]

Shoot sports in jpegs. Get blown highlights with white uniforms on sunny days. Software (Bibble Pro) is not so good at highlight recovery with jpegs. Figured I should try to get the image right to begin with. Any ideas?....maybe dial down the exposure compensation by a stop or more and then bring back detail with the fill light slider? or should I meter in a different fashion?

[ChrisPerry]

You're probably just gonna have to live with it. A 40D/1D3 with HTP turned on will help, as will shooting RAW - you can get 9 to 11 stops of DR this way.
Working with white in the hot sun is just tough. Pick what you want to expose for (the face if it's people) and let everything else fall where it may.

[Mark C]

Thanks for the feedback, think I'm going to start shooting sports in RAW, it slows me down some but it will give me more latitude....what is the HTP function that you mention?

[ChrisPerry]

HTP - hightlight tone priority. It shifts the sensitivity of the sensor by a stop to the right in some fashion. You lose ISO 100/3200 but it works great!
How does RAW slow you down? On a 40D I see no issues. RAW files are larger so there's more download time and some processing time I suppose. I shoot weddings and come back with 1000-1200 files in RAW and have to sort thru them anyway, so the added time to adjust exposure, CC, crop is small. The conversion happens while I do something else so it's not costing me anything other than planning ahead a bit.

I'd tend to want to shoot action sports in JPG myself. Since WB should remain relatively stable you should be able to shoot JPGs just fine.

[MarkC]

I read about HTP in the manual, did not know about that feature, thanks!...yes I was referring to the time to process the larger files, but Bibble is so darn quick it's not really an issue. Thanks for the great advice and insight!

[Noel_Carboni]

I suggest trying this:

Set your metering mode to Evaluative, and set your Exposure Compensation for -1/3 to -2/3 stop. Your images might be a bit dark overall, but the camera will generally retain the highlights and you can process the images to pull up the dark parts.

Shoot in Raw mode to get the maximum possible dynamic range.

Consider trying your conversion in Canon DPP and comparing to the results you get with your current program. Photoshop was the undisputed leader in highlight recovery right up until recent versions of DPP were released. I've actually seen DPP pull more detail out of nearly blown highlights.

-Noel

[LarryRyder]

Shoot manual exposure. Unless both teams uniforms are similar tone any metering mode will have issues. The team with dark uniforms gets over exposed, the team with light uniforms gets under exposed. This is because the camera always assumes 18% gray +- any compensation. I always shoot sports in manual mode.