Category Archives: Metering

The Best Colors Come From the Best Exposures

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Gretag-Macbeth ColorChecker

Gretag-Macbeth ColorChecker

When it comes to your digital camera, the better your metering skills, the better your  colors will be.  If you learn how to master exposure, you will get the best possible colors your camera is capable of producing. Why not put your camera on auto exposure and then correct the exposure on the computer? Because you won’t get the best colors. In auto exposure mode your camera is designed to give you average exposures, not the best exposures. This is very important: If you don’t nail the exposure in the camera, the colors in a photo will shift in different directions and no amount of computer work will bring them back. This is one of the best kept secrets of great color and it is why professional landscape, fashion, and advertising photographers are obsessive about exposure. There is no getting around mastering exposure if you want great color.

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Metering Wildlife in the Snow

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Elk in the Snow, Rocky Mountain National Park

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.

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Metering Snowy Winter Scenes

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Mount Hunter from a Bush Plane. Denali National Park. Alaska.

Mount Hunter from a Bush Plane. Denali National Park. Alaska.

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.

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Fountain Kiss, Bicentennial Park

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Fountain Kiss, Bicentennial Park

Fountain Kiss, Bicentennial Park

I was working on my last photo of the day for the “Picture Today, Inspire Tomorrow” project on May 15 at ADAY.org (more info here). When I planned my day, I wanted to end up at the fountain at the new Bicentennial Park in Columbus, Ohio. It is a great place to take pictures. As I visualized the image ahead of time, children would be playing at the fountain, creating blurry silhouettes.  I already have a “children in the fountain” photo in my files, but all photos had to be taken on May 15.

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Lens Apertures and Depth of Field

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Trumpet, f/4

Trumpet, f/4

One of the wonders of exposure is that dozens of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO combinations can provide exactly the same exposure (the overall lightness or darkness of an image), but very different artistic “looks”.  Experienced photographers know which exposure combination to choose to get the image they want.  Inexperienced photographers who leave the camera on program mode are turning all of the artistic decisions over to a computer chip.

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Speaking Your Camera’s Language: Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO

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50mm lens with aperture blades set to f/2

50mm lens with aperture blades set to f/2

Mastering exposure is a huge step toward better images. But to make your camera do its exposure tricks, you need to speak its language, and it’s not hard to learn.  Apertures, shutter speeds, and ISO settings are exposure’s “Big 3”. Not only are they the key to technically correct exposures, they are the experienced photographer’s secret weapon in the pursuit of creative, dynamic images.

You can learn the language of exposure in this article which is part of an ongoing series of exposure articles which are linked on this page.