OK, now it is time to move on to some of the more tricky, technical bits. We will start with exposure.

Take Lots of Photos

This might seem a little obvious, but the most important thing to do when stepping up to an SLR is to take lots of photographs. Again, digital makes the world a lot easier. In the days of film life was quite difficult for students of photography. Film was very expensive and there was no way out — you just had to buy it! With digital you can shoot as many photos as you want, simply deleting the dodgy ones.

Getting the Right Exposure

Most photographers shoot lots of pictures, often taking more than one shot of each scene. The reason they do this is to ensure that they have the best exposed shot to work from, either in the darkroom or in Photoshop.

Camera Light Metering

These days cameras come with very sophisticated light measuring systems (and we’ll talk more about these later). When your taking a landscape picture, the camera will take readings from many different parts of the scene and will average them out to give you a good, baseline for the photo. In many situations the camera metering works very well, but it can be fooled.

On a grey overcast day your camera metering system will be quite reliable. But on sunny days — when there is a great contrast across the picture —the camera’s calculations may not be reliable.

Believe me, there is nothing worse than getting home to find that one great shot is useless because the exposure is wrong!

Bracketing

In order to guarantee better results photographers employ a technique that they call bracketing. In simple terms the photographer (or camera) calculates the exposure and then takes a first shot. Then the photographer will ‘bracket’ the shot, taking one shot at a higher exposure and one at a lower exposure. This gives us a range of exposures to work on when we are back at the computer. In the field I might take four of five exposures of a really good shot,and I might calculate the base exposure in a variety of different ways (some tips coming up in a later post).

Taking landscape photos without bracketing is very dodgy. Why? Well, if some of the detail is over-exposed you’ll never be able to get it back, no mater how hard you try. Digital cameras are very tolerant of light and they have a wide latitude, in other words they can capture detail in remarkable conditions. But if the photo is ‘bleached’ that detail can never be recovered.

Let’s consider this shot.

You can easily see that the picture is over exposed. We can deal with the land quite easily by adjusting brightness and contrast. But the sky is a real problem. There should be a lot of cloud detail here, indeed you get some hint of it. But the detail has been ‘bleached’. It simply has not been recorded by the sensor and nothing we can do can retrieve it. While digital cameras often record an amazing amount of detail in under-exposed parts of the print they are less tolerant to over-exposure.

This was the only shot I have of this scene — sometimes you don’t have time to bracket. It may have just been a spur of the moment shot and I guess it was — it’s not very interesting!

The shot was taken on an automatic setting. The camera was fooled by the light and set its exposure mainly for the foreground. Bracketing — taking a shot that was underexposed by one stop (or indeed two) might have really pulled this back. Don’t worry about ’stops’, we’ll come to that.

So detail can be lost. But bracketing also helps give us a better starting point for dealing with difficult scenes, for example, when there is terrific contrast between sun and shade. Consider this exposure.

Quite a contrast! You can see that there is detail in the shady bits but the light bits are not bleached out. We’ll look at how to calculate a good starting exposure later on, but for this shot I took a manual exposure for the light, another for the dark and worked between the two. Then — using the very sophisticated shadow and highlight tool in Photoshop, I could deal with the balance of the shot. Here’s an example of what can be done.

I’ve knocked this out quickly, but you can see that there is detail in both parts of the shot and — with a bit of work — I could balance this off nicely.

This is point of darkroom processing. But this only works if the detail has been captured. Without bracketing much of this detail would have been lost.

So, go and shoot lots of photos. If you get a good scene take your time. Take more than one shot. Bracket up and down.

To Bracket One ‘Stop’

fstops are worth a post on their own. But to bracket on stop either:

1. Increase the aperture by one whole increment – say from f11 to f8.

2. Decrease shutter speed by one ’stop, ie. go down from 125 to 60.

And then decrease exposure from the base, in other words go from f11 to f22 or increase speed from 125 to 250.

Bracketing Automatically

Many modern DSLRs allow you to bracket automatically when in one of the automatic mode. Basically, the first shot you take is at the base exposure, the second is under exposed and the third over exposed. You can often set the increments for over and under exposure.

Personally, I don’t find this helpful. It is far better to bracket manually as experience is key.

With experience you’ll be able to read the conditions more. You might work out that a 1 stop bracket will work or you might decide to bracket at 1 stop and at 1.5 or even 2 stops. This really means working in manual.

Manual exposure is not really that complicated. get out and try it and have a look at the results when you get home. The computer will have stamped the exposure details on each shot and you can see how bracketing has had an impact on your shot.

If you want to be sure of getting that shot — then bracket, bracket, bracket !!!!

Next time we’ll look further into exposure, looking at different exposure modes in the camera and some tips as to where to calculate exposure in a scene.