Posts Tagged ‘Exposure’

Exposure in photography refers to how bright or dark an image is. An under-exposed photo is one that is dark, while an over-exposed photo is one that is bright.

Most people tend to use an auto exposure mode on the camera, where the camera works out the exposure for us. For example, the Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, Program, Intelligent, and Scene modes. But even if you rely on an auto exposure mode, it is still helpful to have a good grounding in how exposure works, and how the different exposure settings work together.

Although the auto exposure of modern cameras is pretty good, they doesn't always get it right. This is especially true if there is a large difference in brightness between your subject and the background.

For example, a person in a dimly lit room with the sun shining in through a window behind them. You'd probably end up with a photo where the person is a silhouette, but the window is exposed correctly. Great if this is what you wanted, but not so great if you were trying to capture the person's portrait.

IMG_0870.JPG by busbeytheelder on flickr (licensed CC-BY-SA)

There are a few different things you can do to fix this. We'll first look at the camera settings etc. you can use to fix the problem on location. Then we'll look at options for fixing existing shots using image editing software.

Is there such a thing as the perfect exposure? To get the perfect exposure, you will first need to identify the main subject of the picture you are taking.

It has been that said the most difficult thing for man to do is to judge his or her creative work, objectively. Be honest, can you tell when your work seems to be missing something? More importantly do you know what it is that’s missing? You can only improve your photos if you set a high photo standard to compare yourself against.

Along with aperture and shutter speed, ISO is one of the settings on your camera that you can use to affect the brightness (exposure) of your photos. Unlike aperture it won't affect depth of field, and unlike shutter speed, it doesn't affect how quickly (or slowly) an image is captured. However, it can affect image quality by introducing what is known as 'noise'.