Look, See, Reflect, Do: February 2009

Saturday, February 21, 2009

What is Correct Exposure Part 2

del.icio.us Tags: exposure,dof,shutterspeed,f/no,photography

The Perfect Picture’s Creatively Correct Exposure video tutorial is interesting to watch, but it encourages newbies to link two different facets, “technically correct exposure” and “creative choice of f/no for depth of field” without a seam. Sure, a veteran photographer juggles both these facets intuitively.

The newbie though, does need to pause and think that these are two facets – they overlap in the fact that the f/no is present in both facets but that’s the only thing they overlap in. Otherwise the spiral of confusion, that winds into equivalence of every facet (f/no, shutter speed, ISO, sensor size, focal length) perpetuates.

In truth, Bryan is demonstrating exposure (the permutations of shutter speed and f/no). He’s not speaking of twiddling the ISO dial (because in the film days, you could not easily change ISO in mid roll) nor is he talking about the effect of different digital sensor sizes and focal length.

Bryan Peterson explains this slightly better in this second video – emphasising choice of shutter speed:

and another video, emphasising f/no

In truth, Bryan's videos and the title of this very blog post should be more aptly changed to "Choosing an aperture and shutter speed permutation to effect creative control of the visual aspects of the photo" rather than "Understanding Creative Correct Exposure". Because we have not yet begun to discuss whether we should underexpose or overexpose a scene (in modern parlance on a digital camera, twiddling the Exposure Value compensation dial, to creatively darken or lighten the whole photo so that we can target the face of a person as the most important element in the photo.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

What is Correct Exposure Part 1

his is an oft repeated question by newbies to photography. An oft repeated reply by people who have “seen the light” is that the “correct” exposure for a scene is what you want it to be.

Huh?

We often point to the exposure meter in the camera (classic film SLRs) or histograms in the DSLRs. and we tend to say, you must try not to “burn” highlists (overexposure) by avoiding histograms peaks pushed flush against the right edge. And you must not push histogram peaks against the left edge otherwise you get inky dark shadows that have no detail (underexposure). Heck, even some photo competitions state one of the rules is that you must not submit a shot where the Photoshop eyedropper goes 0 or 255.

Well, that’s generally true. Except that often, you can’t avoid one or the other or both. That’s because, regardless of the medium – negative film > transparency film > 24x36mm sensor DSLR > APS-C DSLR > Four Thirds DSLR > small sensor compact, the natural outdoors or indoors harsh scene will have a Scene Brightness that exceeds the Dynamic Range handling ability of the camera. I was musing on that when I compared my photos, with technically correct histograms against someone else’s photos where there was so much “pop” in them. Having a technically correct histogram does not make the photo visually interesting.

That’s because the histogram is only a two dimensional report of scene and subject brightness (well, maybe two and a half because you can have separate R G B histograms as well). The histogram does not tell you:

which part(s) of the scene is causing the spike(s)
about what curves, shapes and visual geometry make the subject interesting
whether the face or interesting part of the scene is “correctly” exposed – can you see the detail, texture of of the face and so on.

In a recent article, The Online Photographer describes and discusses Dynamic Range and even Local Contrast. It’s a good read.

So, what is Correct Exposure?

del.icio.us Tags: histogram,exposure

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

A car feast, courtesy of the RACV

On Australia Day, the Victorian RACV hosted a vintage and veteran car exhibition. Owners brought their prized possessions to show off. It must be real dedication to hunt for parts, scheme out ideas to keep these cars in good nick.

Ford is a well known car company – it’s amazing to see the original logo with the italicised treatment.

The Graham Paige must have been famous in its day.

For a spot of colour, how about this

One can only cross one's arms in pride

Friday, February 13, 2009

Odd skies

The Victorian Bushfires in 2009 have been a tragedy. And the season is not over yet. The mood around Melbourne is sombre – people are affected by the bushfires or they know people who are affected by bushfires. Over the radio, one caller to 774 said she sleeps with the radio under her pillow. At the Clayton campus of Monash University, I saw the flags at half mast in the morning.

In the evening, the smoke from the fires had turned the setting sun orangey red

The five wood sculpted trunks outside the Monash Art Gallery looked strangely surreal like aliens in a dry land.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Chinese New Year in Melbourne 2009

Oh, had a really lovely few weekends shooting with Brandon and Dave. Brandon’s photographic style is coming along very nicely and many of his shots are simply compelling.

I dragged out my Kodak P880 as I had not used it for many shots for a long time. I shot JPEG (formerly I used to shoot RAW), didn’t concentrate on full wide (24mm equivalent) and used lots of fill-in flash. The results are a style which is quite different from my previous P880 ventures.

First stop, to get some fortune wheels