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In my previous post, I discussed about the best tips for composing better photographs. It’s been said that if you already have an eye for a picture, the next big hurdle is to get the metering and exposure right.

The biggest advantage of digital cameras over film is the fact that you can instantly check your shot once you’ve taken it. You can bring up a histogram to check the brightness range of a scene – and make sure you’re not underexposing or overexposing it. You can, if your camera allows, switch on a flashing highlight to show you any blown highlights where detail will be lost in your photograph. You can then change your exposure accordingly. And if all that fails to produce the balanced exposure you want, you can go some way to rectifying it while image-editing. It is, however good to get things right first time – to produce a high-quality image in-camera which you only have to do minimal editing later in Photoshop Lightroom or whatever Photo editing software you are using.

On the surface, camera  exposure seems a pretty straightforward business. Basically, in order to produce a well-exposed pictures, the camera has to make sure the right amount of light reaches the sensor. Since the image is formed by the accumulation of light on the sensor during the exposure, you therefore need to adjust the length of the exposure (the shutter speed) and the light intensity (the lens aperture). All digital cameras have exposure systems which do these computation and give you the most logical combination of speed and aperture settings automatically (Just select the auto mode!).

So what’s the problem? Truth is, even the most sophisticated camera metering systems do not have the capability to know what the camera is looking at, or what the photographer’s intentions are. This is where you need to take control of your camera. Have you ever wondered why professional photographers who own the most sophisticated DSLRs with features capable of doing everything that technology has to offer switch to manual mode most of the time?

I don’t want to go into the gory technical details of how exposure systems of cameras work. There are already a lot of blogs and websites of professional photographers where you could learn about these technicalities. I just don’t want to sound boring! Instead, I’ll list some of the most important things or topics that you need to understand and work on in order to properly expose your photographs.

Top 10 things you need to remember to get the right exposure for your photographs.

1. PHOTOGRAPHY EXPOSURE TIPS – Shutter speed and aperture are interchangeable

Digital cameras control exposure using both shutter speed and aperture. Why both? There are creative advantages to these two means of exposure control. Smaller lens apertures offer more depth of field (near-to-far sharpness), while fast shutter speeds let you freeze fast-moving objects. If you want to use a smaller lens aperture, you can compensate it by choosing a longer exposure. On the other hand, if you want a shorter exposure, you simply set a wider lens aperture. For example, if your camera indicates an exposure of 1/250sec at f/8 but you want to shoot at 1/1000sec, which is two stops, or EV values, faster, you need to increase the aperture value by two stops as well, to f/4. Some cameras allow you to adjust shutter speed and aperture values in 0.3 EV steps, but the same principle applies – a change in one must be mirrored with a same-sized change in the other.

2. PHOTOGRAPHY EXPOSURE TIPS – Always remember to take a midtone with you

But what is a midtone? Midtone describes areas of the scene which are more or less in the middle of the tonal range (light to dark) or the parts that you want to expose correctly. But how dark or light

are these mid-tones? In order to work out the exposure, your camera has to work to a standardized average ‘grey’ tone – 18% grey, to be precise – and try to adjust the exposure to reproduce your subject with this level of brightness. This is one of the principle drawbacks of all built-in camera meters, no matter how sophisticated. So what’s the most practical solution? Pack a grey card in your camera bag, or better yet, buy a mid-toned camera bag which you can meter off.

3. PHOTOGRAPHY EXPOSURE TIPS – Learn how to read and understand histograms

Do not just rely on a simple playback of your images to judge if you got the right exposure. Instead, let the camera show you precisely by displaying the histogram. (This is actually one of my biggest mistakes when I started using digital cameras!) Many cameras can display ‘live’ histograms as you compose a shot and/or histograms for saved images just as you can display a histogram in Photoshop and other image-editors. The histogram will tell you whether you have ‘blown’ highlights, blocked-in shadow detail, whether there’s a full range of tones, and how light or dark the image is overall. It’s basically a bar chart (though with so many bars they blend into a continuous curve) showing how many pixels there are for each brightness value across the tonal scale, from dense black to brilliant white. Remember though that histograms are a diagnostic tool that simply tell you what the image is like. They’re not there to tell you what the image ought to be like because that is essentially your job as the photographer.

4. PHOTOGRAPHY EXPOSURE TIPS – Watch the background

Be aware of how the tone of a background can influence your camera’s meter. Light meters may not be able to understand that different subjects may have different intrinsic brightness levels, but camera makers have at least been able to allow for difficult and contrasty lighting conditions. By default, digital cameras use ‘multi-pattern’ metering systems that measure the light values at numerous points in the scene. This helps them build up a picture of the type of lighting you’re shooting in, and the camera may adapt automatically to backlighting, for example. Multi-pattern metering systems are hard to second-guess, though, and many photographers prefer simpler ‘centre-weighted’ metering, which averages the whole scene but places extra emphasis on the central area. Spot metering is very specialized. It takes a reading from a very small area of the scene only.

5. PHOTOGRAPHY EXPOSURE TIPS – Be aware of highlights

When exposing for dark subjects, look for any bright areas that might be blown out as a result. As a general rule, it is best to meter for the highlights and let the shadows fall where they will. Remember, it is much easier to recover underexposed (dark) areas in your editing program later but overexposed or blownout areas are lost forever.

6. PHOTOGRAPHY EXPOSURE TIPS – Switch to spot metering for tricky lighting and small areas

Spot metering allows photographers to get exactly what he is looking for. Meaning you get the “desired exposure” not the “correct” exposure. For example, when shooting a picture of a person against the sunset. Using spot metering, the photographer has a choice which to expose properly—the bright sunset or the person in the foreground.

7. PHOTOGRAPHY EXPOSURE TIPS – Restore the whiteness: How to deal with white subjects

If you simply point your camera at a bright white subject using either the spot or center-weighted patterns and shoot at the suggested exposure values the whites will, of course, be rendered as a medium tone–gray. Have you tried shooting a bride in a bright white gown using your point and shoot camera? Did the bride’s dress turn out white when you viewed it in your image editing program or when you printed it? So how do you get a bright white in your photos? Solution: If your subject is large in the frame and bright white, spot meter off them and add 2 EV to 2.5 EV.

8. PHOTOGRAPHY EXPOSURE TIPS – Carry a set of filters

When shooting landscape scenes, photographers often struggle with bright skies, particularly on overcast days, when the sky is so much brighter than the foreground. So, the choice is to either expose for the foreground and just simply overblow the sky into a featureless white, or you expose for the sky and hope you can recover enough detail from the dark areas in your image editing software. So, if the brightness range is too great (it often is), you need another solution—a ‘neutral density grad’, a filter which is darker at the top than the bottom. Usingthis kind of filter, you can darken the sky enough to even up the exposure without affecting your foreground. So the solution is to always pack a graduated neutral density filter and polarizer. Later on, you will realize that they are not just useful for landscape scenes only.

9. PHOTOGRAPHY EXPOSURE TIPS – Use fill flash for outdoor portraits

Outdoor portraits are often difficult to pull off successfully, especially in bright sunlight. If you face your subject towards the sun you reduce the contrast range but you make them squint. If you position them on one side, you get ugly shadows across their face. And if you shoot them with their back to the light, you have the problem that their face is in shadow against a bright background. However, if you set your camera’s flash to forced flash mode, and as long as you are a meter away or so from your subject, it can provide enough ‘fill light’ to even up the tones.

10. PHOTOGRAPHY EXPOSURE TIPS – Fuel your creativity.

Do not always aim for the ‘perfect’ exposure. Instead, experiment with going to extremes and see if you can produce striking and creative results. You may, for example, a brilliant and ethereal effect by putting a fair-skinned model against a bright background, and use an exposure which just captures the details of the face. Or, choose a dark background, contrasty lighting to produce a far more somber and dramatic portrait.