Exposure Setting

Using the +/- exposure adjustment you can bring out parts of the photo you want in the middle of the luminosity spectrum range even if there are very bright or dark photos in your image. For example, say you wanted to take a picture of something against a bright sky as illustrated in the picture below. Leaving the camera on an exposure setting of 0 will render your object very dark.

What if my object of interest is too dark? What we actually want to do is bring out the item of interest regardless of the background and this can be done by setting the exposure much higher than 0. Say we set the exposure to +2, the sky now becomes very bright and over exposed, however we can now see our subject.

A good example of this is say taking a photo of a bird in the sky. You want to get the bird looking nice and balanced and don't really care if the background sky is a little over exposed.

What if my object of interest is too light? If there are some very bright patches of interest or we are taking our picture in a dark setting and want to minimise motion blur, we may set our exposure to a slight negative value (say -0.7). This allows us to later bring up the light levels a little resulting in a less blurry, less grainy shot. It can be a balancing act finding what works best in each situation but erring on the -ve side of the exposure setting I find works quite well.

Some situations where you might want to change the exposure include performances where a person is lit up in front of a dark background. The camera will average out the light and most likely over expose the performers face on an exposure setting of 0, therefore reducing a little will balance out the part we are interested in - we really don't care if parts of the background end up black.

What if I want both parts of a picture?

Occasionally you will have the situation where part of the picture is very dark and the other part is very bright, yet you wish to capture both parts in good balanced detail. There are some things you can do. The first is to buy an expensive high dynamic range camera which effectively takes two shots at different exposures and combines the parts of each photo in their respective middle dynamic ranges. The second option is to manually take two photos at different exposures and combine them using some photo editing software. Whilst this may work for very still scenery, it won't work too well for anything that is moving and you will find things much easier with a tripod.

Lastly you can do one more thing. Shoot in RAW format. Pretty much all digital SLR's these days have a raw format setting which allows you to capture an uncompressed version of the photo. If you have dark or light bits in your images, the raw setting gives you a lot more range to salvage information in either very dark areas or very light areas of your photo using digital photo editing software such as Light room. Whilst many professional photographers don't shoot in raw format as they are confident with the way their shots will turn out, it is a great thing to do when you are starting out on your digital SLR as it allows you to salvage some great shots from some average ones later on. There should also be a setting that allows you to take a combination of RAW and compressed jpeg. This is my preferred setting as you get a whole bunch of shots which are great for most applications (i.e. websites, emailing, viewing etc) yet the raw is sitting there for those shots which are really great. You can crop, edit and manipulate the raw files for your special shots while the rest are nice to keep as a memory. Jpegs are also a lot easier to view than raw files which typically need some fancy software to view and edit.

Digital SLR Tutorial

Ever wanted to get a simple introduction to using a digital SLR? Follow these lessons for improved pictures.

• AUTO Function
• Using a Flash
• Exposure
• ISO Speed
• Aperture Function
• Shutter Mode
• Manual Mode
• Using a Tripod
• Examples to share

Photo Editing

Digital photos rarely turn out perfectly. Here are some photo editing tips to make your shots look like they are from a magazine!

• Crop and Rotate
• Removing Dust
• Levels and Shadows
• Brightness, Contrast
• Colour Balance
• Vignette Effect
• Saving Pictures
• Some Examples

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