Improve Your Photo Exposure

Striking the Right Balance of Light

Once you have a handle on the digital photography concepts of composition and sharpness, it's time to take on photo exposure. Your camera exposes images well Photo Exposure Topics enough without your help (see sidebar, "Why discuss Exposure Last?"), but it doesn't handle all situations. And, as you'll learn, you have lots of opportunity to help the camera do a much better job of using light to help your creative expression.

You can break the discussion of photo exposure into a number of topics:

Exposure Mechanics

Before looking at all the ways that light impacts the quality of your images, it is helpful to understand how you and the camera work together to physically control the exposure.

First, this topic explores the key elements of exposure:
- ISO
- Shutter speed
- Aperture

Why discuss Exposure Last?

If photography is about painting with light, why isn't photo exposure the first topic in the CSE triad, before composition and sharpness?

On one hand, I think you'll find that exposure is the most complex of the Composition/Sharpness/Triad topics. That's the bad news.

On the other hand, the good news is that today's cameras do a reasonably good job of exposure, at least in most cases. This is as true for many point-and-shoot cameras as it is for digital SLR's.

When you practice composition and sharpness techniques, you are making decisions that the camera cannot make for you. Cameras can automatically select shutter speed, but won't necessarily meet your goals because they can"t know whether you are trying to freeze motion or introduce motion blur. The camera can automatically set aperture, but it can't know what depth of field you want. And, the camera just plain can't select and compose your subject for you. These are all subjective decisions that only you can make while relying on your mostly-good auto exposure.

It won't be long before you discover that your camera's automatic system does not always give perfect photo exposure. For example, photographing your wife with the sun behind her usually leaves her face dark. Shooting bright white snow often yields gray images. Similarly, shooting in dark spaces often yields gray images. Reflections can dominate your image while putting everything else in shadow. And the list goes on - even the best of camera metering systems need guidance from you at some point.

Once you've exceeded your camera's auto exposure limits, you'll find an endless list of subjective decisions, more than for the topics of composition and sharpness. So, now is the time to explore the multiple dimensions of photo exposure.

Best or Optimum Exposure

With the mechanics understood, you will be prepared to think about the best exposure for a given composition. This and the following topics move incrementally from a mechanical understanding of photo exposure toward more expressive exposure considerations.

In this topic, you'll get a sense of one way to look at ideal exposure, plus learn associated techniques and tools to give you more fine control, emphasizing:
- Using histograms
- Exposure bracketing
- Exposure compensation
Black and White Concepts

Black and white images provide a medium to explore the principles of light and exposure without the complications of color.

In this topic, you'll expand on what you've learned about histograms to explore:
- Tonal contrast
- Tonal distribution
- Form - use of tonal areas as compositional elements
Color Concepts

Color, with all its visual glory, complicates the photographer's life with a myriad of special qualities. Color photo exposure concepts include:
- Tonal contrast in color
- Color contrast
- Emotion, mood, subjectivity
- HSL - visual perception of color as categorized by hue, saturation, and luminosity
- RGB - display of color via the red, green, and blue pixels of your monitor
- White balance - to compensate for ambient light conditions
- Chromatic aberration.
Quality of Light

Closely related to white balance is the question of light quality. Time of day, weather, intensity, and light source all play into the mood that light imparts on your images.
RAW Image Files

RAW image file formats store the most complete information that the camera is able to capture before it converts files to the more familiar JPEG format. The main advantages of RAW files relate to image exposure, which is why many professionals prefer the format and why the topic is discussed in this section.

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