Few things can be as confusing to a new photographer as the concept of exposure. I can assure you now that I am not the exception here. Often I find that I missed a good shot because, while my meter said it was ok to go, I did not expose that part necessary to accurately capture my vision.

When the lighting is for the most part even, exposure is generally not a problem because, well, the lighting is even. However, as those who have spent a little time behind the viewfinder know, light rarely is even in any given composition. There are areas of light and dark which run a pretty wide gamut. This is where the problem usually occurs as exposure of one extreme often causes the other to suffer.

Here is a case in point. The first flag picture below was taken with a Pentax 645 with Kodak 400VC film. For this picture I placed the center of my viewfinder over blue sky (I don’t remember exactly where) and snapped the picture. The result was a nice blue sky, but the flag, as you can see, was very dark.

I metered the picture and snapped it when it said ok, but I didn’t think much about what it could look like until I thought more about the settings. The camera was set at f/22 with a 1/1000 shutter speed (which also happens to be the limit for this lens/body combination). When I looked at the flag again and thought about what it would look like, I correctly predicted that the flag would be dark, but to be honest I really wouldn’t know for sure until the film processed. I decided to take the picture again only this time I decided to expose the flag and recompose. The result was a much more vivid flag:

The other thing you may notice about this is the sky went from a semi-bright blue to a bluish gray color. I’m no light scientist, but I would venture to say that this is because the camera let in 4 times as much light this time around (f/22 at 1/250) and the result was a slight overexposure of the sky. When I got the film back from the lab and scanned it in, I was amazed at how much difference existed between the 2 photos when just changing the exposure base.

The reason I can bring this to you now is this marks the first time I made a concerted effort to record my settings after each photo. In the past I metered, shot, and moved on to the next thing. I find in film this can be a little self-defeating as since I couldn’t check on the settings at the time of the photo, I wasn’t able to make any correlations on why one photo worked and another didn’t work (from a technical stance… aesthetics are another matter altogether). I could check shooting digital, but even then with the sheer number of digital pictures it becomes somewhat overwhelming comparing all the settings.

When it comes to digital versus film exposure, there is a fundamental difference. My first photography professor told me that it is better to overexpose than underexpose because an overexposure contains more “information” than an underexposure. Well, I took this information to a concert with me and found that I took a lot of overexposed shots that no amount of digital manipulation could fix. What my professor left out was that overexposure is better for film photography (unless of course you have a 15-second shutter speed at 2:00 in the afternoon). I can’t really blame her for that as we were supposed to be focused 100% on film photography. When it comes to film, you should generally expose for shadows where in digital you should generally expose for highlights. From what I can see, highlights can be recovered quite well in the darkroom, but DSLR camera sensors don’t handle blown highlights nearly as well as a pack of Ilford paper.

So the biggest lesson here is to record, whenever possible, the settings used to take a picture. It takes a little work in between shots, but when specific settings can be tied to a specific photo it becomes very easy to see what works and what does not. This will hopefully translate into one being able to take the best picture the very first time.

As always, comments are accepted and welcome.

PS – As for the flag picture, a little light and color balancing on the 2nd shot yielded me what I think is a beautiful flag. I call it “Phoenix Rising”.