Well recently I’ve been giving more thought about how and why I expose my pictures a certain way and then I think back on all the advice/tips I’ve been given (and have also given myself) about it. So for this post I’m going to go over everything I know and I hope that will give some insight to you and your pictures

Let’s first do a simple thought experiment that will help you visualize what is going on. Picture  a tap and  a bucket, now imagine filling the bucket to the top represents a “proper” exposure (I’ll explain it later on).  You can now relate the aperture as the size of the tap and the shutter speed as the length you leave the tap open. So if you have a bigger size tap, you won’t have to turn on the tap for as long and the inverse is true. If you want to get fancy you can imagine the bucket size as the ISO. The higher ISO you go the smaller the bucket gets. Simple, no?

If that went totally over your head, drop me a line or I’m sure someone out there can explain it better.

On to “proper” exposure. Now in my books, there is no such thing. Now let me explain. I use to think that proper exposure was that the needle in the viewfinder had to be in the middle and everything was peachy. I soon found out that where the needle went greatly depended on the scene I’m trying to photograph as well as the metering mode I was in. Throw in lights and I had no idea what to do. My next revelation was to use the histogram. As long as everything was inside the box (nothing clipping) it was all good. This kinda went out the window when you had a really high dynamic range scene, think dark forest with light rays streaming through illuminating certain areas. So This brings me to now. There is no “proper” exposure, you either got the shot you wanted or you didn’t. For example in my Ferrari shoot:

Here the shot is really overexposed. A lot of the image is pure white meaning on the histogram I had a ton of pixels clipping. On the exposure meter on the camera, I believe it had a reading of +1, and I’m on spot metering. But did I get a shot I wanted? Sure did.

In the next image, here I underexposed the image, notice all the pure blacks. I believe the meter was saying about -1 or -1.5. Again, did I get the shot I wanted? Sure did!

So what I’m trying to say here is, play around with your exposures! Stop defaulting to the “proper” exposures and worrying if the needle is pointed at zero. Don’t worry about clipping blacks or whites. Photography may start with rules but they eventually turn into guidelines.  And be glad you are in a digital era where you can instantly see your masterpiece (or lesson) right after you click the shutter. Purists may mock but it really accelerates learning when you don’t have to worry about wasting film. Sure it may develop bad habits, but that’s up to the photographer to be cautious about.

And on another note. I have found that adobe camera raw does a good job fixing exposures for raw files. I’ve bumped exposures up to +1.5 and down to -1 and was still pleased with the results.