Basic Exposure Techniques

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Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

When you take your photographs, good lighting should be a priority. No matter how good is your composition, if the lighting is not good, then the whole photo will not be good either. Good lighting, on the other hand, defines the form of your subjects and show them in vivid colors. That’s why the camera should be set to collect the correct amount of light.

Exposure is the amount of light that is collected by the photographic medium, whether it is a film or a digital sensor, while shooting a single photograph. There is no fixed value of a correct amount of light, because it depends on the available lights, the objects, and the photographer’s judgment. However, it is safe to say that there’s an acceptable exposure and an unacceptable exposure. Most exposures that obscure details while not adding any artistic value are considered unacceptable.

Basically, a dark scene will need long exposures, allowing more light to be collected by the sensor, which translates to a well exposed photograph. If less exposure is used, the photograph will become darker as a result of the underexposure. Alternatively, a bright scene will need short exposures, limiting the amount of light collected by the sensor, yielding a well exposed photograph. Otherwise, the photograph will be overexposed, having too many bright areas, the bright subjects loosing their details, and the dark subjects looking too bright..

The camera controls the exposure through shutter speed and aperture. Shutter speed controls the time for which the shutter will stay open. The faster the shutter speed is, the less light will get to the sensor. As for aperture, it determines how wide the lens is opened. Narrow aperture will let less light pass through it than a wide aperture. Another component that affects exposure is the ISO speed, which indicates the light sensitivity of the sensor. Higher ISO speeds will make the sensor more sensitive to light, reducing exposure, but it will add undesired noise to the photos.

In manual exposure mode, aperture and shutter speed are usually set independently. When automatic exposure is used instead, the camera will calculate the optimum exposure based on the light meter used. Because of the lack of manual controls over exposure in many low-end cameras (including most digital compact cameras), exposure compensation (if available) should be used to fine tune the automatic exposure suggested.

Photographs with very dark and very bright spots will not show correct exposure on all their parts using any type of cameras. High Dynamic Range (HDR?) photography, which employs capturing the same photograph at different exposures, is used in this case to solve this problem.

A good approach to learn more about exposure is to look at the exposure settings of your previous photographs, and compare them Look for the exposure time (shutter speed), the aperture, the ISO speed, and the exposure compensation in the data that is stored in your image files. As a result, you will get a clearer idea on how exposure can impact your photos.

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