I know that exposure isn’t the sexiest thing to talk about…we just want to make awesome pictures and really hope that we grabbed the perfect shot the first time. But unfortunately that rarely happens 🙁 So I’m here today to discuss this dreaded word: EXPOSURE. If you LOVE exposure, kudos to you and I’m slapping a high five at you right now! If not, let’s help you understand what happens with your camera when it makes the exposure and how you can work it!
Let’s dive in a bit deeper than the 3 parts that make an exposure that I talked about a couple of weeks ago.
Once you really understand exposure, you’ll have so much power while using your camera, and if you’re a power freak like me, you’ll be in photography heaven while you photograph. No Snap Shooting for YOU!
I talked about the steps to start your learning fun with exposure. For now, just play and don’t stress out. You’ll get it!
Here is another visual to help you see the difference of how bright the sky is compared to the grass and trees in the field. I manual shot the best image paying attention to what I could bring out when I processed this in ON1.
The grass looks great, but I couldn’t get the clouds to pop.
1/125 @ f6.7 ISO 200 Manual Mode Over Exposed
Now the sky looks amazing, but everything else looks like crap!
1,3000 @ f6.7 ISO 200 Manual Mode
So this was the shot I had to work with. I had just enough information to pull out what I wanted to make my river of grass shot. 🙂
1/350 @ f6.7 ISO 200 Manual Mode
It was tough, but I worked the image and got what I wanted in one shot! Whew! Fun…fun!
Correct Exposure to get the shot.
This is another way to get up close and personal with your camera, so when you start to photograph and just look at your scene, you’ll start to know what’s going to happen before you even push that shutter button. I’d like you to be different than the snapshooters, and the way you really begin to create your OWN work is to understand that there may be problems with your exposure and to know what to do when those problems arise.
Normally I ask you questions, but I thought today it would be better for YOU to ask me questions. If you want more techie answers, I’ll answer them here in the comment section. Feel free to ask anything about exposure, I really do want to help if you’re just not understanding why the pictures are not turning out the way you want them to!
Cheers,
Janice
