Basic Exposure Techniques

When you take your photographs, good lighting should be a priority. No matter how good is your composition, if the lighting is not good, then the whole photo will not be good either. It has this power to ruin a good image and make it useless, but it also has the power to make an ordinary photo, a great work of art. Learning how to capture the correct amount of light is an essential part of photography.

During the capture of a single photograph, the photographic medium (film or digital sensor) is allowed to gather a certain amount of light indicated by its exposure. Correct exposure is not fixed value, as it depends on many variable including the photographer’s taste and the photograph’s elements. But there is a range of accepted exposures that, while produce different results, cannot be seen as mistakes. Unaccepted exposures are, in general, due to a mistake rather than a photographer’s intention.

Low lighting conditions require high exposures to allow more light into the sensor, brightening up the final photograph. If less exposure is used, the photograph will become darker as a result of the underexposure. As for bright light conditions, low exposure will be enough to gather sufficient amount of light to produce a photo with good lighting. If more exposure is used, the photograph will become too bright with many blown highlights.

The camera controls the exposure through shutter speed and aperture. Shutter speed determines how long the sensor will be exposed to light. The faster the shutter speed is, the less light will get to the sensor. On the other hand, aperture controls the degree of openness of the lens. Narrow aperture will let less light pass through it than a wide aperture. ISO speeds also affect the degree of exposure. At high speeds, the camera will collect light faster and will amplify the sensitivity of the sensor, but will add noise to the photo.

In manual exposure mode, aperture and shutter speed are usually set independently. As for automatic exposure settings, the camera will determine the degree of exposure needed according to the light metering technique used. Because of the lack of manual controls over exposure in many low-end cameras (including most digital compact cameras), exposure compensation (if available) should be used to fine tune the automatic exposure suggested.

Photographs with very dark and very bright spots will not show correct exposure on all their parts using any type of cameras. Usually, photographers take the same photograph at different exposures, and combine them together using software programs.

A good approach to learn more about exposure is to look at the exposure settings of your previous photographs, and compare them Look for the exposure time (shutter speed), the aperture, the ISO speed, and the exposure compensation in the data that is stored in your image files. This is the best way to understand these things practically.

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