What's best in exposure

I personally remember the days of black and white film. That time we were instructed to “expose for the shadows, develop for the highlights” to make the ideal negative. With positive color films, we would expose to hold detail in the highlights, and let the shadows fall where they may. But in the current digital format just getting the exposure “between the uprights” of the histogram may not be enough. The sea of change in exposure methodology now is intended to place as much data within the RAW/NEF file as is possible.

In linear digital capture, the brightest stop of highlight data contains half of all the information contained in the entire image. The next stop represents half the remaining information and so on. The issue is not about overexposure but that a file has the greatest chance to reproduce detail if the information is justified closest to the highlight side of the RAW/NEF file. Despite all the recovery that can be done in postproduction, you can make it remarkably better.

Thus, the current mantra for the new ideology is Expose to the Right, placing the highlight point of the histogram (without clipping the highlights) by adjusting the camera exposure value to maximize file information.

Photography

All things on digital photography: basics, lighting setups (available light & strobist), advanced techniques, accessories and imaging solutions.

Strobist

Lightpainting

Joel Grimes Photography

Zach Arias Photography

Photoshop

The mecca of all digital image processing is Photoshop. It is therefore not uncommon to see publications whose photographs have been enhanced with Photoshop. There's some learning curve to deal with and quite steep at the start. But with perseverance you can get to the level you want yourself to be and create art of timeless beauty.

Welcome!

Creative people don't stop with just taking a great photo. They move on to create even better images and end up with art of timeless beauty. To the creative bunch, this is for you. PPL can get you there by tweaking P photography, P photoshop and L lightroom.


For the picture of Paulene So above, an off camera flash fitted with Lumiquest Softbox III @ camera left was placed 1.5 meter from the subject. This was done as a fill-in flash for the harsh 3pm sun.