As I stress in my books and at my photography workshops, seeing the light is one of the major keys to getting a good exposure. If we learn how to see the light – the highlights and shadows in a scene, the contrast and color in a scene, the subject’s and the background’s brightness, and even the movement of light – we will become better photographers by making better exposure decisions. We’ll also know when we need to control the light, using a reflector, a diffuser or a flash. And sometimes, we’ll learn that if the light is not right in a certain location, we’ll need to move the subject or change our composition, as was the case when I was setting up this picture of a Native American near Lake Powell, AZ.
What follows in this Mpix blog is a collection of my photographs that I use in my workshops to help students see the light.
To digress slightly for a moment . . . have you ever heard the term “tone-deaf” to describe a person who can’t tell the difference between musical tones? Well in photography, we use “value blind” to describe a person who has a hard time seeing the subtle differences between light and dark areas of a scene.
Fortunately, there is hope for the value blind photographer – because we can all learn how to “see the light.”
Dynamic Range
In a discussion about seeing the light, we need to begin with what we see with our eyes vs. what our digital camera records. Our eyes are amazing light seeing devices.
We can see a dynamic range of about 11 f-stops, which is why we can see shadow and highlight areas of a scene without the shadows being blocked up and the highlights being washed out. A digital image sensor sees/records only about three f-stops, about the same as slide film. So, when shooting with a digital camera, you should expose the scene as though you are using slide film – paying very careful attention to the highlights in a scene, and being very careful not to overexpose them. That was one of the things I was thinking about when I took this picture of a mother polar bear and her cute cubs in the sub-Arctic. Had their fur or the snow been washed out, the picture would have been a “wash out.”
In Photoshop, it’s possible to pull out shadow detail and rescue some overexposed highlights (especially with RAW files). We can even go beyond what we can see when using High Dynamic Range in Photoshop.
Seeing Differently
Here is an idea that most less experienced don’t think about, brought to mind in this quote by Norwegian symbolist painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944): “At different moments you see with different eyes. You see differently in the morning than you do in the evening. In addition, how you see is also dependent on your emotional state. Because of this, a motif can be seen in many different ways, and this is what makes art interesting.”
I photographed these polar bears early one morning, when my eyes and I were just waking up. The softness of the image, and my emotional state (I was missing my family back at home), drew me to the scene, one of many on the tundra. Perhaps the close cropping was a result of the closeness of my family.
Keep up with this blog and learn about seeing the light, but don’t forget that how you feel also affects your exposures.
Rick Sammon
www.ricksammon.com