One thing that I’m going to spend some time during the shoot working on is exposure.  I know it sounds silly to still be working on exposure since that’s what photography is all about.  But I’ve found that exposure is not as easy to understand as it seems.  Sure I could can rely on my meter and move the dials until the meter indicates a “correct exposure”.  The problem with this is that there is no “correct exposure” that will be “correct” all the time.  My meter might tell me that the correct exposure for a composition might be ƒ8 1/125th sec. but if I shift my composition slightly, the meter might make me jump to 1/200th sec. TTL  meters in most of today’s cameras are good but I know that my in camera meter doens’t always give me the image I want when it reads a “correct exposure”.

I find that my camera’s meter is about 1/2-2/3rds of a stop to bright.  This is great for bringing out details in the dark areas of an image but it tends to blow out the highlights which is worse.  I’d rather play it safe and lose the detail in the shadows if I can retain the details in the brighter areas of my image.  One of the ways to do this is to take notice of the histogram view after the image is captured.  Making sure that the graph shows me data in the middle of the histogram.  If the graph is touching the left edge, the image will be too dark.  If the graph is touching the right side of the histogram, then the image contains blown out highlights.  By making sure that the graph stays in the middle of the image ensures a good exposure with good contrast and saturation.  I will of course see how this works during the shoot with Jillian and report back later….

During my last few shoots I really had a difficult time with my exposure settings.  I felt I needed some help in this aspect of my shooting.  Bryan Peterson does a great job of explaining exposure in a way that makes sense.  Easy to follow and very natural even if you know very little about cameras and how they work.

One idea he presents which blows my mind away is the idea that there are at least six maybe seven correct exposure settings that you can make for any situation yet there is only one artistically correct choice.  I hope I got that idea right because it’s a big deal.  What it means to me is that there is one image I want to capture and only one correct exposure setting for it.  That’s idea totally destroyed everything I thought about photography.

This weekend I’ll take my camera and play around with some of what I learned from the book.  Unfortunately I can’t afford to shoot with a model this weekend, but it’ll be good to just play around and see what I see.