Photography Tips, Exposure.

6/1/2015

How to get the correct exposure in your photos.

Getting the correct Exposure

What settings to use to improve the exposure levels in your photos.

Whether you use a DSLR or a digital point and shoot camera there are always some slight changes you can make to improve your photos. Hopefully this series of monthly newsletters will help you to get better shots.

Firstly, let me briefly explain exposure. This is not how many followers you have on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. This relates to the amount of light let through your lens onto the sensor and as a result, how light or dark your image may be. See below.

This image has been under exposed. Meaning the lens wasn't open long enough to capture the image.

This image has been over exposed, meaning the lens was open too long and the image has been burnt in too much and therefore data has been lost in the image.

This Image is as close as you could get to a correct exposure. You can still see some of the detail under the bridge, although some parts are too dark, and you can see most of the detail in the clouds, except for a little loss in the centre of the main cloud.

So how do you get the exposure correct? Now there are a few ways, I will cover the one that I mainly use for most circumstances. On your camera you have probably seen the following symbols.

These refer to the metering method your camera will use to determine the exposure. Generally number 4 is the standard or default option. This basically looks at your whole image and determines an average exposure.

I personally like to leave my camera set to number 2. This setting is what is called spot metering. Where it only will look at the colours directly under that central dot to determine what the exposure will be. Now you must understand what you must point this at to get the best exposure possible.

When cameras were first invented they only shot in Grey scale, or Black & White as it is more commonly termed. And even after all our advances in technology relating to photography, exposure still goes back to how it was done it the Black & White days.

This is how it works, in the black and white days, to get a good exposure you would look to expose something to what is called middle grey, which is basically half way between black and white and depending on your monitor, looks something like this.

Now because the vast majority of photos we take are of people, most cameras are set up to look at a persons face or skin and make this middle grey. Also co-incidentally, most green grass on average will give you a middle grey colour if shooting in Black & White.

Now that you know this, how do you use it? Well going back to my pictures above of the cityscape. You will see below I have converted it to black and white.

In this picture you can see that parts of the blue sky and parts of the circled building behind the bridge are roughly a middle grey colour. So for this picture I put my dot on the building and used this as my focus point and metering point as this would work for this image.

How else does this technique work?

If for example, you are taking a picture of a bride in a large beautiful white dress and a groom in a black suit. If you were to use the default metering setting you more than likely will have a photo that is slightly under exposed due to how much white there is in the image. This makes the peoples faces too dark and you may loose detail in the groom's suit.
But if you use spot metering and place the dot on the bride's face, The faces will be the middle range colour and then because this is half way between black and white, the bride's dress should be exposed correctly and so should the groom's suit. Now there are always exceptions to this but we will cover that in a future newsletter.

I hope this was helpful in some way and hopefully through future newsletters I can help you improve your own photography skills.

If you liked this newsletter, then please share it with your friends via the links below. Or if you haven't liked me on Facebook, then you can also do that below as well.

Thankyou and see you all again soon.

Brendan Fellows