Exposure is another tricky part of photography to master. Just like WB, exposure is a matter of your personal preference. You might like a dark, foreboding appearance to your images, or you might like that bright high key look, there is no perfect exposure. The challenge is trying to get an exposure which shows details in both the highlights and lowlights. Photographers who often struggled with this problem were those who did weddings. They had to capture images of the bride and groom in various lighting situations while exposing for details in the brideâs white wedding dress and the groomâs black tux. There is no substitute for experience and it takes time to master. There are some techniques that can help, itâs up to you as to what you prefer.
One technique involves a process known as HDR, or high dynamic range photography. Basically what this entails is taking three of more exactly identical images which are all exposed differently. One is slightly underexposed, another is exposed evenly, while the last is slightly overexposed. Running these images through the program results in a composite image that contains details in the highlights and lowlights.
Photoshop has come a long way and itâs easy to get great results. One of the great tools is to photograph in the RAW format. When you import images, the RAW program opens, and you can change your exposure in the program. You can also adjust the highlights and shadows seperately allowing you to gain details in bright and dark areas of your photo.
Using your camera. My personal choice is to shoot in manual mode and set my shutter speed and aperture accordingly. But I also check my cameraâs histogram and blinkies to quickly see if the highlights are clippingâŚâŚ So what is clipping? Clipping is overexposure which exceeds the sensor. There will be no details captured in the area and thereâs nothing that can be done to regain details, other than to physically paint them in
Lighting is the most important aspect of photography. Without light, you donât have a picture. Many of the pros will use strobes to capture the perfect shot, but truth be told, any light will do. The advantage of strobes and flash guns is they are easy to control and easy to adjust. But they do come at a cost. Strobes arenât exactly cheap, and the pros often use more than one. Then there are triggers to fire the strobes remotely, be it an infrared or white light signal, radio transmitter or hard wires. Generally I prefer radio transmitters (Pocket Wizard in particular) to any other remote triggers thanks to their consistency, and no need for line of sight between camera and strobes.
To do good lighting on the cheap, you can use a lamp, flashlight, video lights or natural sunlight. Keep in mind that any type of lamp producing a constant light that you plan to use, will not be as bright to the camera as it is when you see it with your eyes. If youâre using a lamp, go with a bright bulb and plan on extending the shutter speed so the camera can capture more light over time. Of course you will need to set up your camera on a tripod for any shutter speed slower than 125th.
Also, try to avoid turning up your ISO. Doing so could introduce unwanted noise especially in the dark areas of your image.
Natural sunlight is a great option, however direct sunlight can be pretty harsh and create high levels of contrast you wonât be able to adjust out in PS. You will need some sort of light modifiers such as shade or a scrim. You can also build a shadow box which you can place in the sun to photograph your subjects.
Donât forget that you can use reflectors to help light a subject. Donât use mirrors for this, rather use something white to reflect light onto your subject, such as a piece of paper, a towel, sheet or anything else thatâs easy to work with. Some photographers will use professional reflectors. Usually a mylar panel that is silver on one side and gold on the other. I do not prefer these as they can reflect too much light and the gold side produces color casts, but there are white ones with a black side.
The importance of RAW. Ok. So most cameras photograph in a universal format called JPG or JPEG. This is the go-to format which will display on all modern computers. JPG also has the advantage of being a very small file size. However, it has disadvantages. The reason JPGs produce small files is that the files are compressed. When you take an image, that image contains all sorts of information, but for most uses, most of that information isnât necessary. So the camera contains an onboard processor which compresses the image and tosses out all the âunnecessaryâ information thus saving space. However that âunnecessaryâ information which is normally disposed of, can have many uses which we can take advantage of.
In the previous posts, I mentioned that you can adjust white balance, and exposure after the fact, when you photograph in the RAW format. This is only possible in the RAW format because all the information which was taken at the moment the photo was taken was retained and not compressed out. This means that if you werenât happy with the WB, exposure or you want to make colors pop, enhance the highlights, de-noise or sharpen in RAW you can adjust everything to your liking. Itâs like having another chance to get it right or simply PS in RAW. Some pros may call this cheating, but I simply call it a useful tool. And there are other hidden advantages with using RAW. Some cameras have a heavy handed compression algorithm that can make images appear softer or slightly less focused and introduce JPG artifacts during the compression process. Processing RAW into JPG on your computer is less intense and reduces these issues since the processor in a computer is usually better than the processor in your camera. JPG has another disadvantage. Every time you re-edit or copy a JPG image, the image degrades. If you do this a number of times, you will notice the images will look worse and worse, like an old VCR tape which has been re-recored over and over. This isnât as much of a problem with RAW since the format tends to be more stable
The main disadvantage of RAW is, itâs a much larger file and that means you need more space in your computer to save the images to. This is easily resolved as there are now very large hard drives available which has the capacity to store thousands of RAW images if you happen to save that many images. I will also say, whatever you choose, if you want to save your photos back everything up.