Harry's Blog

After months of noodling around, reading books and magazines and worrying about how things are supposed to work, rather than how I want them to...I've finally hit on a method of manual exposure photography that works for me.

So I thought I would share it with you.

But first a little lesson about the use of histograms on the current range of Canon DSLR cameras. I'm going to assume you are shooting in RAW because...well why wouldn't you?

Remember your camera doesn't store an equal amount of detail in its entire range. The bulk of the variations of tone are at the top lighter end. So while you may have 4096 shades at the highlight end, you may only have 128 at the shadow end. So it makes more sense to expose as much of your image towards the right of the histogram and bring back some of those shadows towards the left in post-processing.

But exposing to the right is tricky when your camera keeps telling you that you've blown all your highlights and pushed too far to the right, only for you to discover there's nothing unrecoverable in the RAW file once you are post-processing.

The histogram that appears on the camera LCD after taking a picture isn't always the clearest guide to exposure, nor is the blown highlight alert option. The problem is that the histogram is based on a small JPEG embedded in the RAW file.

So if you used a picture style that, for example, ultra-saturated the reds in the image, the histogram and highlight alert may show a picture of a pink rose is full of blown highlights when this is not the case. Your picture may even be slightly underexposed, but the JPEG post-processing has blown the reds after the fact and your RAW file is fine, with no highlight issues.

So how do we get round this so the histogram is a better guide to getting a good exposure while out in the field? Set your camera picture style to Faithful, but alter the style to contrast and saturation at zero (both all the way to the left). Remember these settings aren't going to affect your RAW file but now you'll get a histogram that doesn't jump off the scale on the right when there's no reason to.

Got that? Good.

Now let's move on and hopefully you won't even need the histogram much at all. But at least it will be much more useful.

Here's how I've been taking landscape shots over the last few weeks. Over the last weekend I finally nailed this approach and I expect this is how I'll be taking pictures from now on.

1. Set the camera to full manual mode.
2. Exposure mode is set to spot, if your camera doesn't support it use partial/centre weighted instead.
3. Set an appropriate aperture. In landscape photography f8/f11 is good for everything being of a distance from you, f16/f22 if you have foreground detail too.
4. Meter the camera on the brightest element of the scene which you wish to capture (but don't point your camera at the sun, if the sun is close to your picture point to the brightest point of sky near it while keeping the ball of fire out of frame).
5. Once you've metered on the brightest point - perhaps a cloud - move the light meter point in your viewfinder to +2EV by lowering the shutter speed.
6. Recompose on your subject and take the picture.
7. You should have a well exposed landscape shot.

In practice you can often expose a little further to the right. So get the bright point to +2EV then go one stop further. Your post-processing software will still save anything further than that and often a few blown specular highlights are of no consequence in a well-balanced picture.

The above may sound complicated but in practice it's rather quick and easy. Easier enough to gather a shutter speed you may require then fire off many shots as long as the lighting doesn't change.

And while it's not ideal to grabbing quick snapshots of your toddlers running around, once you've used this approach to meter a scene you can then keep snapping away - perhaps at fast moving toddlers or anything else.

For me developing this personal approach has actually taken away a lot of complication and worrying over correct metering. It's so simple that once practised you just stop thinking about exposure and instead take lots of interesting pictures that are well exposed and make the best use of your camera's dynamic range.