Exposure – Part 1

When you first pick up a more advanced camera, it can feel exciting, cool and scary all at the same time. If it’s a DSLR, it will be big and black with buttons all over it. There are strange symbols that might as well by hieroglyphs…

You know that this is the sort of camera that real professional style photographers use, so it will surely provide you with amazing pictures right? Well, some time later you might experience frustration when your expensive new purchase has not “magicked” you into the new Henri Cartier-Bresson, Vincent Laforet or Joey Lawrence (hint – check these guys out). But fear not! As most experienced photographers will tell you, they were all terrible when they first started out – you are among esteemed company! There’s a learning journey to take and we’ll try to keep it really simple.

Before we get into the details of exposure, let’s start with some basics. Grab your camera user manual (yes you heard right) and take the time to read the introductory sections. Get familiar with the following camera controls and features:

Camera mode | Shutter speed | Aperture | ISO | White Balance | Histogram | File Type

Here’s my suggested starting recipe – start twiddling dials:

• Camera Mode – set to M (for Manual) We are going to stop the camera from making all the decisions, so that you can learn what happens to exposure when you change things.
• White Balance – set it to “auto” as a starting point.
• File type – set it to “jpeg fine” or “jpeg large” if that’s what you camera calls it.
• ISO – set to 200 for now, I’ll explain more about this later.

Eating your Exposure Greens:

A good picture is properly “exposed”. In other words, you have captured enough light to register a wide range of light and dark tones, without losing any detail that you wanted to keep. Here are three examples to make the concept easier to grasp, together with their histograms, which we will address below:

Overexposed (losing highlight details):

Notice how the highlights have blown out a bit, and the histogram is pushed over against the right hand side?

Well exposed (Captures a good range of highlights and shadow detail):

See how there is a good range of tone from shadows to bright whites without loss of any detail, and the histogram is well spread across the range?

Underexposed (Losing shadow details):

See how things are dark and muddy, with no clear highlights? Also notice what the histogram is doing – pushed over to the left.

More to come…