The Next Step: Learning Exposure

The last section, we laid out the basics of photography, particularly, the physical things and concepts that you need to know before heading out to take pictures. What we learned from the last section will give us a better foundation and it should allow you to take in more information and complexity along the way.

With that said, in this new section, we will be dealing with a concept that you may have heard about but certainly have not dwelled deeper into. This concept is exposure and knowledge about this will primarily set you up, not just to take pictures, but to take great ones in under different conditions.

As we slowly let go of full auto in our cameras and embrace your own style through manual photography, we need to start learning how to manipulate the light around us and make it our own.

In the coming lessons, we will continue to refer to our ISO, shutter speed, and aperture - three concepts that we have familiarized ourselves already from the last section. Now, we take a step further out of the shadows and learn not just light, but exposure.

The Key to a Higher Degree

Without light, there won’t be photography and studying how light affects your camera is studying exposure. I could brave myself enough to tell you that without understanding exposure, you are bound to take subpar photos so we better do well in our lesson today.

If you recall from our previous section, images are produced by letting light in your camera through various means, right?

Now, we also learned that we can control the light we are letting in and we are now naming that process as exposure. Whenever we adjust our aperture to let in more light or slow our shutter to give light more time to enter, we are actually controlling how much we are exposing our sensors to the light - thus the term exposure.

Learning about exposure will bring you a step closer to completely mastering how to manipulate light through your ISO, aperture, and shutter speed adjustments. Once you have mastered these things, you will be equipped to take photos in different situations from low light or night scenarios to high noon and sunny ones - manually.

Exposure

We mentioned that exposure is the amount of light you are allowing to enter your camera. Light heavily affects the outcome of your photos, making exposure a delicate topic.

In order for us to proceed with our discussion, there are two basic terms that you need to know.

Overexposed - When we say that a photo is overexposed, it means that you let in too much light in your camera. An overexposed photo will be unrecognizable due to the extreme and unnatural white tones in the image.

Underexposed - underexposure is the opposite of overexposure. When we say that an image is underexposed, it means that you let in little to no light at all inside your camera. The result can range from an indistinguishable subject to a pitch black picture.

Now that we have that laid out already, we can now proceed to learn what exposure is all about, particularly the two factors that heavily influence it.

First and foremost, when it comes to exposure decisions, one of the factors you have to look at is the amount of light that is hitting your subject. Your subject is the one that needs all the attention of your camera and you always have to make your adjustments and work around your subject, which includes the light hitting it.

If your subject happens to be under the sun and you didn’t make necessary adjustments, then you will end overexposing it. Vice versa, if your subject happens to be under a shade and you shot without taking note of that, chances are you will end up underexposing it.

The second factor to take note of when it comes to exposure is the amount of light you actually want to take in. Adjusting how much light goes inside your camera can be done in numerous ways that we have already discussed in the previous section.

To widen your shutter and take in more light, you can adjust your aperture settings. Consequently, to give light more time to get in your camera you may adjust the shutter speed. Finally, to adjust the sensitivity of your sensor to light, you may adjust the ISO settings.

Conclusion

Exposure can make or break your photos and that is one truth of photography you have to deal with every single time you take a photo. Exposure is concerned with the amount of light that factors in your image and if you can’t control it, you can end up with either an overexposed or an underexposed photo.

To help you get your wits above exposure, we discussed the two factors you need to think about which are the light hitting your subject and the light coming in your camera. Keep these two things in mind and you will surely master exposure with practice.

To dig deeper into controlling your images’ exposure, the next lesson will be devoted to the study of the aperture. I am personally excited for that one and I hope you can get your peers to catch up to that as well!