Exposure

Exposure

by William Lulow

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 “auto” setting as a way of determining exposure. I take an image, check it on the camera’s LCD display, then use the camera’s “Manual” 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.

So, I am constantly tweaking my exposures to get just the right balance of shadow and highlight detail.

This is an image where I decided that I was trying to achieve good saturation in the colors. I exposed for the highlights and let the shadow values fall where they may.

In this image, I was going for the basic buildings against the sky shot. I wanted the sky to be saturated so I added a gradient in Photoshop to darken the top part. I also made this image with a gradient filter over the lens to heighten the effect more. Again, the shadow detail was pretty much left out of the equation.

Here is a shot where I wanted to have plenty of detail in both the shadows and the highlights:

This image was obtained by carefully reading the light values in the shadow areas and the highlighted wall to the right and then exposing right in the middle of the two. There is detail in even the darkest areas.

These days, I have been using the camera’s meter and instead of centering the needle on the exact middle of the scale in my viewfinder, I try to underexpose the shot by about 1/3 of an f/stop. This helps saturate the image’s colors. If it is too dark, I can always lighten it up a bit in post-processing or conversely, darken it if it’s too light. Most good digital cameras these days have some sort of exposure scale visible in the viewfinder or near the shutter release button. The one in the viewfinder works best because you see it while you are aiming the camera at your subject.  If you have your camera set to spot meter readings, you can get a good reflective reading off your subject and then decide how to expose the image based on where you put the needle on the exposure graph and then viewing the image on the LCD. You can then adjust your exposure accordingly to achieve the results you want. Don’t forget that there is more you can do with the image in post-processing with Photoshop, if it is still not quite what you were anticipating when you download it.

So, with the addition of some of this careful tweaking of the file in Photoshop, I can usually get just the exposure I want.