While editing our photos from a recent trip to St. Augustine, Florida I came upon the top photo of the historic City Gate of St. Augustine. We had both successfully photographed the entrance to the City Gate from the other side in soft early morning light with no people present. I walked through the gate, turned around and saw this incredible sky above the now silhouetted gate. Realizing that if I photographed the gate on auto exposure the sky would be over exposed and blown out. So I switched to manual exposure and exposed for the sky leaving the gate underexposed (top photo). Now I was able to pull out the detail of the underexposed gate in Camera RAW while keeping that beautiful sky (bottom photo). Remember that it's nearly impossible, even when working a RAW file, to bring back detail from an overexposed area.
Photo was taken with a 24 megapixel Canon, exposure was f8, 1/100 sec, ISO 100
