Working with the river

[QuietOne]

I'm spending my lunch shooting people floating the Boise river. It's been mid-90s F or more lately, so I haven't been interested in moving around a lot. I've found a spot that has a couple of nice, comfortable rocks to sit on. They're in the shade, right next to the water, and I can see through the brush enough to tell when the floaters will get to the clear spot in front of me.

So I'm working on how to deal with the conditions. The sun is high and there are absolutely no clouds these days. These pictures were taken around 3pm. With sunset being about 9:30pm, it's basically midday sun. I'm cutting the glare off the water as much as I can with a CP filter. I can tell the meter is fooled by the strong contrast between the river water and the people and rafts. How badly depends on what people are wearing, whether they've gotten any sun since last summer, what color the rafts are and what they're made of. Good quality rubber helps, shiny plastic is really harsh.

So far spot metering and underexposing has been the biggest help. But glare off the rafts and people's skin and clothing is still an issue. There isn't anything to recover, and especially with legs I have to make sure they aren't front and center in the picture, because they aren't fixable.

I'm thinking that underexposing even more won't help much - the issue is the contrast. So my next experiment will be with allowing a little bit of glare from the water so that the contrast isn't so strong. Any other suggestions?

[Mad Aussie]

Not a lot you can do with moving subjects in high sun other than a strong fill flash. But really the strong shadows show the time of day and go along with the heat of the day.

[JAS_Photo]

I have to agree with M.A. They look good to me. I just wish that one guy had kept his shirt on. :(

[Marko]

100% agree with what's been said here. These shots look good given the harsh light!

[QuietOne]

So it sounds like I set the camera up to give me the best chance of capturing what floats by and after that it's a certain amount of luck. Thanks for the feedback.