Commenting problem.......

In prepping to get the contest off the ground April 1st, I have a problem with commenting. I think it is a blogger problem more than anything else.

Stay tuned for updates.

"What is it? " Contest

"What is it?"
Every day about 7am we will post a new picture to our blog. You simply enter the contest by commenting. The first person to guess what the picture is wins for the day. If you win the contest for three days out of the month, you will receive a $10 coupon towards a portrait session. Every 3 days you can win a $10 coupon. If you win 20 days, we will give you a Free Portrait Session.
This contest is open to anyone within the greater Syracuse area.

Make the sky dramatic

This is probably the hardest tip to remember and it works for silhouettes too. Dial the exposure compensation down on the camera. On most cameras you either have a button marked +/- or a menu item. Just dial down the exposure anywhere from a .5 to a 2.0 stops (that's f/stops for you techies). In this example I dialed down the exposure 1.7 stops.
Why do this? The camera is using it's built in light meter and there's so much bright area with very dark underneath that camera can't figure it out. It also doesn't "see" color the way the human eye does. So in the picture above, this is really what I saw and in the "normal exposure compensation" below, this is what the camera sees.
There's one more plus to this. If your pictures are coming out orange with normal compensation, you can dial down the exposure and take a dark image. You can later bring the light levels back up with software and see the image. This doesn't work every time but you might be able to save a few images that special moment.