Photography :: Playing with light when taking a photo outside your home ::
Playing with the NumbersAs you gain experience working with full-stop adjustments, start using smaller increments to tweak your results to suit both the subject and what you want to see in the final picture. The Sweet-16 system, like your camera’s auto-exposure feature, is basically an educated guess based on statistics. As the saying goes, “local results may vary.” The DSLR gives us instant results that film cameras lack. Use that feature to examine the results, and then add or subtract from the exposure settings to shift the way the image is recorded. Many scenes don’t have lighting conditions that nicely fit any formula’s pre-defined categories, or fit perfectly into a one-stop formula. Your camera may offer adjustments as fine as a one-third or even a one-quarter stop. Consider the conditions Geoff Cronje faced with the sky cover in this image:
We can tell from the dark shadows that the foreground is lit by bright sun. The visible area at the top of the image is cloudy dull, and the storm and lowering clouds seen in background are cloudy dark. A meter reading wouldn’t offer a lot of help in a situation like this. Geoff had to choose how he wanted the land and clouds to appear and base the camera settings on that part of the tonal range. Notice how dark the shadows are under the trees. They are darker than one would expect for a cloudy dull condition. The portion of sky lighting that part of the composition may have been cloudy bright. It is not visible in the image. His exposure was 1/750th of a second at f/8 and ISO of 200. That’s more than one-and-a-half stops less exposure than the bright sun setting for that ISO. There is a very small triangular portion of the clouds, high and slightly to the right of center, that is pure white. Pure white is recorded when a pixel receives an excessive amount of light. This exposure allows the dark clouds to keep their menace. Increasing the exposure would have lightened the clouds and rendered a larger area pure white. The next picture was taken on a day with light cloud cover and bright sun. Terrence Karney adjusted his exposure to produce a nice blue sky that was darker than the blue of the buildings. His fine-tuning of the exposure let him record detail in the clouds, and keep the highlights in the golden domes from going pure white, while reducing the darkness of the shadows under them.
This picture was taken on a sunny day with a few clouds using the Sweet-16 table with a slight variation. The exposure was 350th of a second at f/8 and the ISO number of 400. The Myth of the Perfect ExposureProper exposure is one of the most critical and elusive skills the aspiring photographer must master. If the exposure is a little off, important details may be lost. even the best exposure meter is just a guide. The “perfect” exposure is in eye of the photographer. The light falling on the subject, and the exposure settings, are the two most important elements in any picture. That learning process is a perfect time to developed the basics of camera technique how to handle your camera to get the highest quality images, and ensure that the camera keeps working properly. In the next figure, I deliberately overexposed from the meter reading to reduce the shadow areas of the picture and increase the “lightness.” In the image, I matched the exposure for the outdoor sunlight, underexposing the couple and rendering them as a silhouette.
This figure shows another couple, photographed by my friends Mike Fulton and Cody Clinton at TriCoast Photography, exposed normally for the existing light conditions and showing a full range of tones. A meter can determine the “correct” exposure for a picture, one that usually produces an image file with reasonable middle tones. But, meters can be fooled the “correct” result may not have the appearance the photographer wants The “perfect” exposure produces the image matching the photographer’s vision of the scene, not the meter’s. The “right” exposure can freeze motion, blur parts of the picture or keep the entire scene as sharp as possible. In short, the exposure setting is part of the creative process. To master it we have to learn more about what exposure is and how meters work. |
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