Shelly in the river sunlight
October 15th, 2006
Here’s an older photo from 2005 of the beautiful Shelly in North Carolina. It was one of those very hot days last summer when the heat index was 105. We were driving around hunting for a good place to shoot and decided to try under a bridge. I’ve had very good luck over the years shooting under bridges. The light can be very nice, there are often good backgrounds, and no one on the highway above can see what you are doing.
This shot was taken just out from under the bridge. The rocks were perfect and Shelly was still hidden from the highway. But the light was what some photographers would call bad – harsh direct sunlight through the trees making shadows and hot spots. The scene was bright and glaring with the colors washed out. I don’t believe in good light or bad light, rather I see light as easy or challenging. In this case it was simple to control the exposure to allow the highlights to record detail while letting the limited dynamic range of my digital camera drop the shadows down to what I find to be attractive dark tones. The photograph looks nothing like the scene that I saw because I used the exposure tools available to me to alter it to the scene I wanted to record.
I’m often amazed at how poorly the art of proper exposure is understood by many photographers. When I started taking photographs I usually used a hand-held exposure meter and a Nikon F with no built-in meter. That gave you a pretty good chance at guessing the right exposure. The advances in technology since those days have made the guesses more accurate. In fact, the modern exposure programs built into most cameras are much smarter at determining the best exposure than any photographer fumbling around with a spot meter. But if you want to alter the tonal scheme of your image it helps to understand what the meter is doing to know how to change that to get the effect you are after.
I remember going to a seminar years ago where a photographer talked about his detailed spot metering technique, taking readings from every part of the scene and calculating the perfect exposure. Then he went on to say that he always shot a 9-stop bracket anyway! If you are going to shoot a 9-stop bracket you can just leave your exposure meter at home, one of the exposures is going to be right. Of course, this photographer was sponsored by a major film manufacturer, so we can guess the motivation for that advice.
With digital cameras that’s really pretty simple. There’s no need to guess about the correct exposure any more. The histogram that digital cameras provide gives a graph of every tone in the photo. We can now evaluate and adjust the tones using math on the actual image, not estimates from a light meter. It provides a great creative tool to those who understand and take advantage of it.
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