PV's Photo-Workshops: Control the light - Underexpose technique

photovisions (69)in #photography • 6 years ago

Welcome Steemians!

Back to some photographic workshops. Today I will talk a little about the light and how important is to control it through the settings in our cameras.

Because the light is everything in photography... everyone should now. Control over the light is the only way to express yourself through photography. Light is important in every type of photography - from portrait - to macro, from landscapes to urban exploration. No differences here - in all the cases we can shoot perfectly exposed photos or going in darker sides of Histogram - making underexposed works.

So, why I called it a techniqe? Isn't it just a mistake in photography, to shoot dark, to ignore the light meter, to make a black spots on the frames... No! - It is no mistake - it is a technique which gave us ability to catch the light in a different way.

Word of explanation here is needed. When You make perfectly exposed photo, where You got Your light mostly in a middle of Histagram meter - we have nice details in the dark spots as well as in the light ones. It is correct, it is something we should use almost always! Almost... What we can get using underexposed techniqe? - The answer is - ambient light. When we go below the center in light meter value, we are able to catch very gentle light on detailed surfaces of objects - we can get the deep image, where dark areas are just a background and we can focus on just one element in very intuitive way. The light we get simply stands out on our picture.

When we will try get the same effect from a picture made in the correct way (properly exposed) we have to use light settings in post production to make the picture almost black, later, working a lot with shadows/highlights, control the colours... - it is possible but hard to get and take much more time.
Post production of underexposed picture is really easy - we just need to focus in an element which we want to boost a little with extra light and that is it - all the other parts we have nice and dark like it should be.

Most gentle light is being killed when we overexpose the light so it is better to underexpose Your shots everytime, even when we are trying to stick to the middle of light meter and histogram.

Remember - You can always brighten up dark places but You will never get anything from burned (overexposed) areas.

This is the clue of light control - to feel the balance between dark and light and move between them to get the proper effect.

How to control the light? Stupid question? There is nothing like "stupid question"

In the first steps to more advanced photography we should learn how to control the exposition manualy on our cameras! Not only which setting is controling what - but first, where to find the settings and which buttons or other switches to use.

Controling the light is to play between ISO setting, f - aperture and Exposure Time.
These three pieces together creating our tool to control the main setup every time we are going to take photo. Without it, You can just shoot everything with auto-sets and hope to get what You want... It will be ok in good lighting conditions, but If You want to have something better in different situations, lear these three things first!

White Balance, controlight the DOF (Depth of field), bracketing, double exposures and other stuff like that are in second line - first of all learn to set the exposure in a proper way by yourself.

During the reading You have seen the shots I made today - they all were underexposed, in post processing in Camera RAW I just went up with contrast, whites, sharpness and down with Highlights, exposure and blacks... Some more vigneting and that is it.

Hope You like it... and I hope some of You will learn something from this short workshop.

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