Tag Archives: tutorial

*Metering and Exposure Compensation. Which, when, why?

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Metered off the wall…

Metering for a particular scene can be tricky.  The goal, in most cases, is to expose for your subject, telling your camera what it should consider the proper exposure for 18%, or “Middle Gray” and adjusting your exposure based on the light that is hitting your subject, or the light involved in the scene.  Most cameras will utilize an automatic, average metering as a default which most of the time will do a decent job at keeping the highlights and shadows in control.  First, before we delve into the different metering styles, we should examine one of the most helpful tools on your camera.  The histogram. Continue reading →

*A photographic study in light, Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn Style!

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** Self Portrait – Rembrandt – 1629

(*Blog authors note: Hi, I’ve been seeing a lot of traffic from google searches to this article.  I’d love to hear from those readers about if and how the following article is helping them! thanks and I hope you enjoy – Tyson)

Many art forms mimic the artistic mediums that came before it.  Portrait photography is a way to paint a subject with light and has always been very influenced by the previous predominant form of portrait art, painting.  One master painter that is studied by photographers for his use of light, shadow and impeccable chiaroscuro shading techniques is Rembrandt. …Dude knew his light. Continue reading →

*Aperture!

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Controlling your aperture, and understanding it’s relationship with the exposure trifecta can be one of the most profound tools to manipulating the look of your photographs.  As we discussed in the trifecta post, the aperture is a hole which allows light to pass through the lens and onto the sensor or film.  By controlling the size of this hole, you control the amount of light passing through the lens.  This is it’s primary function.  Bright day, smaller hole.  Dark cave, larger hole to allow as much light in as possible.  The other feature of the aperture is its responsibility for your depth of field (DOF) or area in focus.  If you look at the picture above, you can see on the bar top, that it is blurry in the foreground, sharp at the first wine glass, and then fades quickly back into the out of focus area.  This was achieved by setting a large aperture, which when also getting the camera physically close to the subject in focus, it narrowed my DOF.

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*The Exposure Trifecta. Or, how to shoot on Manual.

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Have you ever taken a photo where your subject looks like a deer in the headlights from the flash while the ambiance in the scene behind them fades quickly to a black abyss?  Or, you try to catch your child scurrying around the house and no matter what you do, the picture turns out as a blurred mess?  This post is being written to help those (mainly my mom) who’ve asked me “how do you do that?” when they see a picture that avoids some of the common frustrating problems.  Whether it be a selective focus, blurred action to accentuate movement or an image that is intentionally over or underexposed, the key to photography is understanding the three main components of proper exposure control.  Hold on to your hat, I am going to help get you off of the ‘auto everything box’ and manipulating your own exposure in no time. Continue reading →