Basic Exposure Techniques

Lighting plays the major role in the photographing process. This is because bad lighting will obscure the photo’s subjects and composition, leaving little to be appreciated. 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.

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. 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. Unaccepted exposures are, in general, due to a mistake rather than a photographer’s intention.

Low lighting conditions require high exposures to allow more light into the sensor, brightening up the final 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. 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.

In case of extreme lighting conditions, it will be difficult to all cameras (including DSLRs) to get acceptable exposure for all shadows and highlights. 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. As a result, you will get a clearer idea on how exposure can impact your photos.

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