How to Get a Correct Exposure

Anyone who's been doing photography for a while probably knows how to nail the exposure on their pictures most of the time. That being said, there are still some difficult situations and some tips for getting a great exposure in camera that it doesn't hurt going over again.

This assumes a basic understanding of stops, camera controls and other basics. If you need refreshers or are just starting photography, you might want to check out this page.

Understand how the camera meter works.
Your camera meter wants to expose the scene for 18% gray. Keep this in mind, because you need to...

Adjust exposure for bright or dark scenes.
Imagine that you're taking pictures of bright, white snow. You aim your camera at the snow to get a reading, adjust your settings for proper exposure, and click away. But all your pictures come out a muddy gray! Remember, the camera meter wants to expose the scene for 18% gray. This means it will underexpose anything that is brighter than 18% gray. So what do you do? Increase the exposure a stop or two, until you get nice, white snow.

The opposite is true for dark scenes - the camera will overexpose them to bring them up to 18% gray. So underexpose them until they look in camera to how you see them with your eye.

Overexpose bright scenes, underexpose dark ones. This might seem counterintuitive at first, but think about it for a bit. It'll make sense.

Check your metering mode.
If you aren't familiar with the different types of metering modes in your camera, check out your camera manual. Usually, the different modes meter from different parts of the viewfinder, so that you can choose which parts of the scene you want to exposure "properly".

Since I usually do portraits, I usually leave my camera in center-weighted metering. If my camera had spot metering, I'd use that so that I could meter off the face.

Use your histograms.
Check your camera manual to figure out how to enable histograms. It doesn't matter which type of histogram you use (luminosity or RGB), just that you take a look at them when you're trying to nail down exposure. Especially watch out for clipped highlights and shadows. If you don't know what a histogram is, check out this article for an overview of them. They're not hard to understand, and they are very, very useful.

Watch for blown highlights.
Most cameras have a feature that shows black blinking over overexposed highlights. If you see white blinking with black, you wont' be able to recover any detail in those areas - so you usually want to decrease your exposure a stop or two until you stop seeing those blinking areas.

Do not try to judge exposure by eye.
You will have problems. The little LCD on the back of your camera isn't really big enough to accurately check focus without zooming in, and it definitely isn't accurate enough to check your exposure. The histogram is a much more reliable method.

Shoot in RAW!
It's been said time and time again, but shoot in RAW! This not only gives you control over your photographs as far as contrast, white balance, and so on goes, but also allows you to adjust exposure (to an extent) after the fact. I rarely get spot on exposure the first time around, and I usually end up adjusting the exposure a little after the fact. No one can nail exposure every time.

So that's about it from me as far as getting proper exposure goes. If you have any other tips drop a line in the comments below.

Learning to Light in Progress

I was lucky enough to have two of my high school acquaintances volunteer to model for me today so that I could play around with some off camera lighting.

I recently got several comments about how shadows were more or less ruining my natural light shots. This shoot was an attempt to work at that. So I'm going to cover some of the shots and analyze them myself to see what I can get from the day - if you have anything to add be sure to leave a comment either here or on my flickr.

Flash


Natural Light


Personally, I like the shadows in the natural light one. They seem to add some depth and feeling to the photograph. However, there is also something to be said for the flash-enhanced picture as well - the relative lack of shadows creates a more perfect look to the subjects complexion (in my mind, anyway).

If I could go back and shoot this exact picture again, I think I would drop the flash exposure a stop being the ambient. Here they were more or less perfectly balanced. Dropping the flash would have relieved the harshness of the shadows in the natural light picture, but still allowed for some depth.

Flash


Don't have a natural light picture to compare this to, as this was pretty much an all flash-lit picture (the ambient was pretty low). The lighting overall is decent, I think, but I would have liked to relieve the shadows beneath her chin and from her hair. A second light to camera right would have fixed that, although a reflector could do the job just as well I believe (as one person already commented in my flickr). I think a reflector definitely needs to be my next camera-related purchase. I'm seeing it becoming more or less a necessity if I'm going to be using only one flash.

Flash


I had the flash on them in this one, but you can't see it. Note to self - research proper methods for overpowering and balancing flash in direct sunlight.

That's all for now folks. I'll edit this post to include more from today once I have them edited.