Dark and Light Subjects
Here you see two subjects: a leopard seal, I photographed in Antarctica, and a polar bear, photographed in the sub-Arctic. If you simply set your camera on an automatic exposure mode, the seal would be pictured lighter and the polar bear would be pictured darker. That’s because very dark and very light subjects can fool a camera’s exposure meter (which measures reflected light) into thinking the scene is darker/lighter than it is, resulting in an incorrectly exposed picture.
The remedy in these situations is to use your camera’s +/- exposure compensation feature. With dark subjects, a –1 exposure compensation setting is recommended as a starting point for a good exposure. With light subjects, a +1 setting is recommended as a starting point for a good exposure. I know that sounds backward, but it’s true. Note that exposure compensation is usually necessary when most of the frame is filled with a dark or light subject.
Warm Light vs. Cool Light
In addition to seeing the brightness level of a subject and the direction of light, we need to see the color of light.
Pictures taken in the late afternoon and early morning, such as this picture of a model that I took near Lake Powell, Arizona, have warm tones: deep shades of red, orange and yellow. Pictures taken around midday, such as this ocean picture, look cool, having a blue tint.
Seeing the color of light can help us make exposure decisions, such as photographing at or near sunrise and sunset to get pictures with warm tones, and vice versa. Seeing the color of light can also help us make white balance decisions, either in camera or in Photoshop or in Camera Raw – all of which let us change the color of light by changing the white balance.
Now we are going to spend some time seeing the light behind a subject, because that affects exposure, too.
Background Color
Check out these two pictures, taken with my camera set on the Program mode, of a man I photographed in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. In the picture with the white wall background, the man’s face is dark. In the picture with the yellow/orange background the man’s face is properly exposed. What happened in the first picture? Well, the camera sees a white wall the same way it sees a polar bear, resulting in an underexposed picture when shooting in an automatic mode. So for a good exposure, I asked the man to pose against a neutral background.
Rick Sammon
www.ricksammon.com