Flying dress shoot

A local company in Dubai offers a ‘flying dress’ photo session in the desert outside the city. I did this in planning for the photography tour I’m setting up for the end of next year. This is my wife, Indiana, dressed in deep purple and posing on a dune with the desert wind playing with the many yards of silk fabric. When I exposed for my wife, the hazy sky lost all detail and became white. It was impossible, given the contrast challenge of digital sensors, to retain detail in the sky as well as in my wife and the dress. So, I took a separate picture of the sun, underexposing it significantly to capture the subtle tones in the sky. I then composited the two images in Photoshop. My settings for the shot of Indiana were 1/500, f/5.0, and 2500, and I used a 24-105mm lens.