Mike, is your goal to screw around with computers for hours fixing bad photos, or learnign to take good photos in the first place?
This forum is ful of the former-- shoot in RAW, badly, and then try to fix things.
Assuming you want to take good pictures...
Learn to look at the light, and at your subjects, and do some thinking.
In the first shot, simply look at her. Elbows are causing shadows, sun is very bright in spots, shadows are dark in spots. You can't even see her face with your eyes, can you? It's too dark in real life.
Now, of you go back to the same spot, make a little tube with your fingrs, and look through it at her face. She'll look much brighter. Take away the tube, and her face goes dark. What's happening is your eyes are actinglike the aperture in your camera.
Your best bet to fix the photo situation is to get rid of the harsh shadows. The two ways to do this are to add more light to brighten the shadows, or reduce the brightness of the sun.
The first is easier, by using some sort of reflector, or fill flash.
The second is possible by holding a large translucent sheet of something --cloth, plastic, window screening -- so it blocks some of the sun.
Or, more sensibly, move her.
For the second shot, you've got a similr problem. Subject is int he dark, background is too bright.
Hard to fix, but the same reflector or fill flash would help.
Or move in close with the camra onmanual, take a meter reading of her face, back away, and take the shot. Her face -- which is what mattrs -- will be fine. Sky will be too light, but that's unavoidabvle, without using flash to brghten the face.
Polarizer would help a bit in holding the sky blue when you open the aperture to get the face exposed properly.
Even light makes nicer pictures, within reason.
BAK
