Digital Photography Exposure for Dummies
With 12 books, hundreds of magazine articles, over a dozen instructional videos, and numerous workshops to his credit, digital photography expert Tim Grey really knows his stuff. In one of his eNewsletters, Tim gives this excellent recommendation for Digital Photography Exposure for Dummies:
I have no idea how Michael Freeman can be a well traveled, international photographer and still find time to write so many terrific photography books. But somehow he manages to do both. I suspect he never sleeps. I imagine him creating images and writing books 24 hours a day, stopping only to eat once or twice a week!!
Sarah
Sarah is a professional fitness trainer and we have worked together before. We had another photo shoot Saturday morning and this is the first photo I optimized from the shoot.
Kristin in the shade with some fill flash.
Cloudy bright days are great for portrait photography. No harsh shadows. Soft even, flattering light. So what do you do in the harsh light (at least for most portrait photography) of a bright, sunny day?
A Moment of Discovery
When you are photographing very active children around 2 1/2 years of age, it is often best to just follow them around and let them do their thing, rather than try to “pose” them. I followed my grandson around my backyard for almost an hour, taking pictures and hoping to get just the right image. To get the best point of view I needed to be on my knees. Spending that much time on your knees is hard on the knees, but what else can you do? When you photograph children you need to be down on their level.
Bruce Munro: Light. Franklin Park Conservatory
Jewel Box Lighting is the art of combining lights, lighted buildings, or lighted objects with a deep blue evening sky. It is a great way to do photography and the exhibit this week at the Franklin Park Observatory is a wonderful opportunity to practice this technique and come away with some unique and memorable images.
Sarah – Window Blind Shadows Portrait
There are a lot of creative options when creating portraits using sunlight streaming through window blinds.
Kristina – Window Blind Shadows Portrait
One of the things I like about winter is the sunlight streaming through my studio windows at a low enough angle to create portraits using window blind shadows. In the summer the sun is too high for me to do this and get the angles I want.
Snow Hummocks, Merced River
Just like metering daytime winter scenes, the key to metering evening winter scenes is knowing what to meter and deciding how much exposure compensation to use.
Elk in the Snow, Horseshoe Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado
Metering dark toned wildlife in the snow is a major exposure challenge. It is usually best to avoid large “burned out” areas (washed out, featureless white) in a nature or landscape photograph, but with properly exposed snow, the wildlife can be so dark as to lose all texture. On other hand, metering for the wildlife can burn out the snow.
Kristina in the Snow
The snow in a winter scene will often fool a camera meter into underexposing a photo, so here are the steps to take to get the right exposure. I throw in a few portrait suggestions too.
Mount Hunter from a Bush Plane. Denali National Park. Alaska.
UPDATE: A revised and expanded version of this article can be found here.
Metering for scenes with a lot of snow can be tricky since the snow fools the camera meter. I see a lot of winter photos online with gray, underexposed snow, which means the camera meter did what it was designed to do and the camera owner didn’t know how to use exposure compensation. The solution is quite simple provided you know what to do.
Kristina at Christmas
On Christmas eve I found myself doing Christmas portraits for a friend’s portfolio (she is an agency represented model). There isn’t a lot of space in our living room when the Christmas tree is up so I had to improvise a bit with the lighting and I needed to get the right mix of flash and ambient light for the look I wanted.
Expectations
To my eyes there are very few things on the planet that are as beautiful as a mother looking forward to the birth of her child. I love beautiful “baby bump” photography.
Incident Light Meter. Photo © Jim Doty Jr.
There’s no question that in some complex metering situations, an incident light meter can be quicker, faster, simpler, and more accurate than the meter in your camera. Many incident light meters can also measure light from an electronic flash, a huge bonus when you are using a flash in the manual mode.
JPEG and RAW Files, both overexposed by two stops and both corrected in Photoshop
RAW files have a number of advantages over JPEG files, one of them being the significant advantage in exposure latitude. You can prove this for yourself by doing a simple exposure test and learn your own camera’s exposure latitude.
Cemetery for Military Working Dogs, Fort Irwin California
This cemetery for military working dogs is at the National Training Center, Fort Irwin California. Something about this place touched my heart. It was good to see the dogs that serve our country remembered in this way. The crosses indicate the dog’s name and the month and year the dog died.
Denali Sunrise from Reflection Pond
You can have many of the advantages of a $300 – $400 incident light meter for less than $20. Sound too good to be true? It isn’t too good to be true. This is about as close as you can get to a photographic “free lunch”.
Sunrise, Gibraltar Island. OSU photo workshop.
This sunrise photo was taken at last year’s outdoor photography workshop hosted by OSU’s Stone Laboratory on Gibraltar Island. The workshop this year starts tomorrow.
Kristina
A backlit, window light portrait can be challenging to meter, but the photographic possibilities are definitely worth it.
Backyard Portrait
Sunlight is usually too harsh for portraits so I try to avoid full sun on the face when shooting outside. My usual choices are to shoot in the shade or put the sun behind my subject (as in the case of this photo).
Window Light Portrait
One of my grandsons was sitting next to me in my office looking intently at photos on my computer monitor. The moment was too good to miss so I grabbed a camera.
Incident Light Meter, Gossen Luna-Pro F
In a lot of photographic situations an incident light meter is faster, simpler to use, and more accurate than a reflected light meter. This article will compare the two and tell you how to use an incident light meter.
Bull Elk Bugling, Moraine Park, Rocky Mountain National Park.
What do you meter when your subject has multiple tones? You could let your camera meter the whole scene and hope that gives you a good exposure, but that isn’t very precise and it won’t always give you the best exposure. It certainly wouldn’t give you a good exposure for this photo of a very dark bull elk at sunset.
Metering Tools
In auto exposure modes, your camera meter is perfectly designed to give you “average” exposures in average situations, but it can’t give you the “ideal” exposure for subjects of all colors and tones in every situation. If you want to get the best possible exposure, you have to take the camera off “autopilot” and control the metering yourself.
Bryce Canyon at Sunrise
Why is exposure so important? Because taking control of the technical side of exposure is essential to empowering your creative vision. In the words of National Geographic photographer, Dewitt Jones, “Regardless of where you are in your photography; beginner, advanced amateur, or professional; vision without technique is blind. No matter how beautiful the conception, a good image will not manifest without good technique.”
Petrified Dunes, Zion National Park.
Zion National Park is well know for its towering sandstone cliffs, but it has other treasures for the photographer willing to look, like these petrified dunes.
Before and After
Mixed lighting (lighting with different color temperatures) can be a real color nightmare, especially if you are shooting JPEG files. Shooting RAW files and processing them with Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) is one of the best solutions to the problem. ACR comes with recent versions of Photoshop Elements and Photoshop.
Baby Boy, A Few Minutes Old.
I had the happy privilege of being asked to photograph the birth of a baby boy. The mother found some of my photos on the internet, she was impressed with my work, and sent me an email asking if I was interested in photographing the delivery of her son. Of course I was!
Color Exposure Latitude Test for a Canon 7D.
Testing your camera’s color exposure latitude is a key to getting good color in your digital photographs. This is a sequel to The Best Colors Come From the Best Exposures. I would suggest you read that article first.