Basic Exposure Techniques

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Saturday, November 21st, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

Lighting plays the major role in the photographing process. 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. Learning how to capture the correct amount of light is an essential part of photography.

During the capture of a single photograph, the photographic medium (film or digital sensor) is allowed to gather a certain amount of light indicated by its exposure. Correct exposure is not fixed value, as it depends on many variable including the photographer’s taste and the photograph’s elements. 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. Otherwise, the photograph will be underexposed, having too many dark areas, the dark objects loosing their details, and the bright objects becoming dull. As for bright light conditions, low exposure will be enough to gather sufficient amount of light to produce a photo with good lighting. If more exposure is used, the photograph will become too bright with many blown highlights.

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. At high speeds, the camera will collect light faster and will amplify the sensitivity of the sensor, but will add noise to the photo.

When manually setting the exposure, the photographer usually sets the aperture and the shutter speed independently. When automatic exposure is used instead, the camera will calculate the optimum exposure based on the light meter used. Exposure compensation is a method of adjusting the exposure by adding fixed exposure values, which is also very useful for camera owners who don’t have manual exposure settings.

Photographs with very dark and very bright spots will not show correct exposure on all their parts using any type of cameras. Usually, photographers take the same photograph at different exposures, and combine them together using software programs.

A good approach to learn more about exposure is to look at the exposure settings of your previous photographs, and compare them Look especially at photographs that you feel are not well exposed, and try to figure out what went wrong. This is the best way to understand these things practically.

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