Exposure I

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.

So, there are times when you might want to underexpose your image slightly to increase the saturation in the highlights. Or, the reverse, to overexpose a bit in order to bring out more detail in the shadows. Ansel Adams, the renowned landscape photographer, who did most of his work in black & white, used to say “expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights.” What he meant by that was that a photographer could get good detail in the shadows by exposing properly for them, and then extend the development time a bit in order to bring about detail in the highlights as well. 

Today, the digital medium has eliminated the need for film development altogether. But one can still use the principle in order to bring out a well balanced image. Only these days, we’re using Adobe Photoshop to help us. You can play around with CURVES or a HISTOGRAM to see what the effects of a “digital Ansel Adams” approach can do. So, I would recommend getting as much saturation as you can for landscape photography and then adjust it in post-production if you like. But exposure is still the key. I set my camera’s meter as a “spotmeter” getting the reading from the center of the sensor/viewfinder and then I use the exposure scale in the viewfinder to adjust my exposure for maximum saturation. I also use a gradient filter when shooting landscapes to fully saturate the sky while keeping the foreground shadow areas open.