Exposure

Exposure

by William Lulow

This article was published back in June, 2018, but I’ve added a lot of information to it. 

These days, so many image makers set their digital cameras to “Program” or “Auto” and just snap away. Often, this leads to bad exposures because even sophisticated cameras don’t “think.” A camera has no way of knowing what’s in your mind as the photographer. And, I doubt that many people who are just starting out in photography really know what a light meter is, how it works, or what it does.

I have to confess that even though I own several light meters, I rarely use them today. Instead, since images are cheap, I have been resorting to using the camera’s “exposure line” (usually visible in the viewfinder or as a readout on top of the camera body) as a way of determining exposure. I look in the viewfinder and make sure that the exposure indicator lines up just a bit to the minus side of “normal” on the line. I then take an image, check it on the camera’s LCD display, then alter the  setting to make the exposure I want. We must remember that the camera’s built-in exposure determining system, which can be changed from a “spot” metering to an “overall” one, will only do what we tell it to. If you want to put some creativity into your image making, you have to set your camera to “manual” more often. Having made images just about all my life, I can pretty much look at a scene and come very close to the correct aperture and shutter settings at any given ISO speed. But it takes quite a bit of practice to achieve this kind of knowledge.

This is the scale in just about every digital viewfinder these days. It indicates the camera’s current settings with regard to exposure. You can see the “-2” and the “+2” sides. The plus side indicates relative overexposure and the minus side indicates relative underexposure. So, when I do landscapes, I’m usually looking for a good deal of saturation in the image tone, so I usually set the scale at approximately one f/stop below (minus) normal. Here is one example of an image shot with this technique:

You can observe the darkness and real saturation of color in the sky as well as the color and tone of the ships themselves. Part of this effect is created with a graduated filter over the lens. Most landscapes could benefit by a little extra saturation of color or contrast in monochrome images. Here’s another:

So, I am constantly tweaking my exposures to get just the right balance of shadow and highlight detail. When you go to make a print from these images, you need to register detail in the highlights as well as the shadow. That’s how you know you have a perfectly exposed image.

This is an image where I decided that I was trying to achieve good overall exposure to render the shadows as well as all the highlights completely visible.  I exposed for the highlights and let the shadow values fall where they may.

So, the art of achieving a perfect exposure is somewhat of a subjective one in that it’s the photographer who decides what he or she wants to show. But a good exposure is also an objective’s quantified science in that it should show complete tonal range. Learning to use the camera’s light meter is a skill that will remain with you throughout all your photographs.