Lighting Challenge – Shooting Bright Exteriors from Dim Interiors

One of my favorite places to shoot on Florida’s Emerald Coast is Fort Pickens on Santa Rosa Island near Pensacola Beach. A relic from the Civil War, the place is a treasure trove of angles and arches and rustic brick, a great place for photographers.

However, it is pretty dark inside the fort and being Florida, a state generally known for its tourist-baking sunshine, it’s pretty bright outside. If you expose for outside, the inside is black…

And if you expose for inside, the outside is stark white…

On my most recent trip to the Fort, I challenged myself to get shots of outside from inside while maintaining detail in both. I have done this in the past by taking two exposures and combining them using layers.

But the challenge I gave myself this time was to do both in one image. I figured the solution was to average the exposures between the outside and the inside, overexposing the outside while underexposing the inside, and then hope the RAW file would have the latitude to go in both directions from there, lowering the highlights while bumping up the shadows.

This is straight out of the camera (overexposed outside and underexposed inside):

And this is after correcting both exposures in Adobe Camera Raw:

Another example: