Mastering Digital Photography Exposure
Posted by on Sep 25, 2010
Mastering digital photography exposure is one of the most difficult things to get right if the light is not in your favour. Wherever there is a lot of contrast or shadows in direct light it is more important you ensure your exposure is correct. I recommend taking a few photos in manual and choosing the best looking out of the photos as a benchmark exposure to use in the same scenario (unless there is a lot of changing light eg. clouds blocking sunlight). By using a constant exposure for the given light in a situation, you can ensure the photos will be evenly exposed every time, so long as you don’t change the aperture / focal length (zoom) or ISO (film speed) or alternatively use a non-zoom lens and leave all other settings the same.
Here are some example situations where this technique is particularly useful:
Somebody standing against a dark background e.g. a hedge or dark building.
Photos of a scene where part is in shade and part in bright light (the best way around this is to go into the shade OR light to get an evenly exposed photo, as the range on many camera’s cannot handle this and you will end up with the shade showing details and washed out highlights where there is too much light.
To make sure you get to grips with mastering digital photography exposure, set your camera to manual and practice with different tricky scenes where you know your camera has come against difficulty in the past. The reason I suggest this, is because often your camera can find a situation difficult where another camera finds it easy and vice versa. For example I used to have a Nikon D70 which struggled to focus on any plain subject such as the sky or a wall, but other camera’s found this an easy task, although the D70 did have some features where it excelled many of it’s competitors.
Here is an example photo of where mastering digital photography exposure has paid off
