I've been reading and studying quite a bit lately on
Birds As Art forum and reading through Arthur Morris's tutorials. If anyone is interested, they're amazing when it comes to the detail they teach you when trying to find proper exposure.
Arthur Morris sends out free weekly updates on his seminars and includes amazing amounts of detail in how he captures those images. What these emails have shown me is that I really need to understand my cameras histogram, but I more or less need to be a expert in post processing.
Lets face it, our fore fathers that we all look up to and try to immulate were good, but their expertise was in the darkroom. They caught the original image with an exposure that they knew would give them leway in the darkroom much like us modern photographers need with our various software tools.
Sometimes I overexpose a specific image because I know I want to go into CS5 and adjust for a certain thing in the image....Just an Example. No two images should be exposed the same unless you're under controlled lighting...is bascially what I'm getting at.
Here is a recent comment given by Arthur Morris when asked about Proper Exposure
1-If you are a serious student, study the principles dealing with Exposure Theory in the original "
The Art of Bird Photography." (ABP: softcover)
2-If you are either a serious student or a casual student, study the "Exposure Simplified" section in "
The Art of Bird Photography II" (ABP II: 916 pages on CD only).
3-Even though some very fine photographers do so, using an incident meter with digital makes zero sense to me in part because very few folks know to use it properly, but mainly because of the following:
4-As above, folks make getting the right exposure with digital much too complicated.
All that you need to do is add or subtract light so that you have data at least halfway into the highlights box on the histogram--the fifth box with Canon, the 4th with Nikon, while making sure that you have at most only a few flashing highlights. This approach only works perfectly 100% of the time with front-lit subjects.
5-If you have more than a few seconds with a subject with digital, you should be able to come up with a decent exposure 100% of the time. In difficult situations that feature extreme and/or unusual lighting conditions you will need to make split second adjustments in order to come up with a use-able exposure. To do this consistently you will need to know exposure theory well so see #1 above and study hard. If you are forced to guess in these situations, you will likely fail.
6-Serious students should know how to work comfortably in Manual Mode; doing so is a necessity when the light is constant and the background tonality is changing. In fact, all but beginning photographers should be competent working in both Manual mode and Av mode (or any other automatic mode). And regardless of what some very fine photographers will tell you, there are times when an automatic mode is best, and other times when it can save the day (while folks working in Manual mode will be dead in the water). Detailed instructions on working in Manual mode can be found in ABP II.
7-Different digital camera bodies from the same or from different manufacturers will almost always require different amounts of exposure compensation (and these differences can be much larger than what most folks realize). Anyone who is moving say from a 40D or a 50D to a 7D or a MIII or MIV will need to learn to add a lot more light than they used to especially when working with low light and scenes that average to brighter or well brighter than a middle tone.
In the same situations, Nikon cameras will need less plus compensation. Before you go thinking that Nikon cameras are better than Canon cameras you had best know that if you have a white subject in bright light with a blue water background with Nikon you will likely be subtracting at least one full stop of light (and lots more if the subject is small in the frame) while Canon users are making images with good histograms in the same situations at zero or even +1/3 stop. You need to pay at one end or the other.
8-There is no need to come up with a "perfect exposure" with digital. You would need a microscope to see any possible difference between a good exposure and a perfect exposure.
Not so with film . To repeat, all that you need to do to come up with a good digital exposure is to add or subtract light so that you have data at least halfway into the highlights box on the histogram--the fifth box with Canon, the 4th with Nikon, while making sure that you have at most only a few flashing highlights.
Final comments: if you are in the field with me, say on an IPT, and you ask me "What's the right exposure?" there is only one right answer: "The exposure that gives you data at least halfway into the right-most (highlight) box of the histogram with only a few flashing highlights at most." (I hope that that is sounding familiar by now.) Sometimes folks ask, "What's the right exposure compensation?" In order for me to answer that one I would need to know the following:
1-What you are photographing.
2-What camera you are using.
3-What metering pattern you are using.
4-The magnification you are working at; this depends on the lens/teleconverter/camera combination. As detailed in ABP the size of the subject in the frame will influence the meter.
5-The framing; again as detailed in ABP, the placement of the subject in the frame will influence the meter.
6-The selected AF mode: AI Servo (C in Nikon) gives you the exposure at the moment the image is made while One-Shot (S in Nikon) locks the exposure when focus is locked. In conjunction with #4, this will effect the exposure.
Hope that helps. When I read this latest email blast, I instantly thought of Trevors post and thought I'd share some of it with my fellow photographers on EXPO
but I'm still learning the GF-1's quirks- which is what I think Trevor is getting at.
