Photography Article Explaining Exposure and Exposure Compensation|Photography Artist Statement

Exposure is some other essential subject matter in photography, and one this is frequently misunderstood or used in a couple of, overlapping usages. This article will introduce the maximum crucial use of the term exposure: as a manner of speakme approximately the overall lightness and darkness of a given picture.

Exposure is likewise the topic for the week of May eleventh inside the Boost Your Photography fifty two Weeks Challenge (#byp52weeks). Read more about #BYP52Weeks or be a part of the institution right here.

Exposure Basics

If you are shooting in any mode other than full manual, your camera is the one calculating and determining the exposure for your photograph. When you shoot in Auto or a scene mode, for example, your camera evaluates the scene presented and chooses what it determines to be the correct ISO, aperture, and shutter speed to give you a 'correct' final exposure. Even in Aperture or Shutter Priority modes, you set the ISO and either the aperture or the shutter, and it is the camera that chooses either the shutter or aperture based on what it determines to be a correct exposure. There can be more than one 'correct' exposure however, and these are known as equivalent exposures. You can read more about correct and equivalent exposures in the article All about Exposure.

The important thing to know is that the exposure determined by your camera may not be the 'right' exposure, as envisioned by you, and that there are several ways to control your the exposure. The main method is to use exposure compensation. (You can read about some of the other methods for DSLR shooters inMore on Exposure: how to fix common exposure problems in your photography or for point-and-shoot shooters in Teaching Kids Photography: shooting modes, focus, and exposure.)

Exploring Exposure Compensation

Exposure compensation is a way of telling your camera that you want a given photograph to be relatively lighter or darker than the calculated exposure. DSLRs and many point-and-shoot cameras have an option for adjusting exposure compensation while shooting. This number line graph often goes from values of plus-or-minus 2 for point-and-shoots to plus-and-minus 3 or 4 for DSLR cameras.

These values are measured in stops, which is a halving or doubling of the amount of light recorded by the camera. So, a photograph shot at +1 exposure compensation will have recorded twice as much light as a photograph shot at 0.

This infographic shows the progression of converting the exposure compensation from minus four to plus three, the usage of the publicity compensation graph.

(This series changed into shot the use of Aperture Priority mode with an aperture of f/five and an ISO of one hundred, and the digicam select the shutter speed to match the given exposure value. Since every unit is one prevent of light, every image represents a shutter pace this is double the quantity of time from the preceding photo, starting from 1/250 of a 2d up to a half second.)

As you would possibly expect, as you flow into the negative values at the publicity reimbursement scale, your overall picture will become a whole lot darker. For this precise composition, by the time you study -3 and -4, maximum of the coloration and information were lost in shadow. This fashion of taking pictures - the usage of a much darker than predicted publicity - is called low key.

Likewise, as you move into the positive values on the exposure compensation scale, your overall photograph becomes much lighter. By +3 for this composition, nearly the entire background has become blown out (white) and much detail has been lost in the flowers. This style of shooting - using a much lighter than expected exposure - is known as high key.

There are many situations where you may want a different final exposure than the one chosen by your camera. When shooting bright snow, for example, you might need to use +1 or a positive fraction in order to get the snow looking bright and white. When shooting a dark contrasty black and white shot, you might need to use -1 or a negative fraction in order to keep your background black and the only light falling on your subject instead.

If you're uncertain approximately which publicity might be the only which you need, you can also use publicity bracketing (some other option within publicity compensation available with DSLR cameras). Exposure bracketing allows you to shoot a series of 3 or extra pictures at varying tiers of exposure compensation (plus-or-minus 1 is a not unusual choice for publicity bracketing). This gives you the additional gain of choosing your favorite exposure later, after you have got the opportunity to study and examine them for your computer in preference to clearly the LCD display of your digicam.

Control Your Exposure

How will you take creative control of your exposure? Share your efforts in the comments below or, if you want a bigger challenge, come join us for the Boost Your Photography 52 Weeks Challenge #BYP52weeks!