Friday 12 October 2012

Perfect Exposure by Michael Freeman

Thinking about the next chapter coming up in TAOP on light and exposure, I wanted to read Perfect Exposure by Michael Freeman in advance.  I frequently get exposure wrong, even though I'm careful to make sure all the setting on my camera are correct so I was interested to find out where I might be making mistakes.  Having read Perfect Exposure I'm still not 100% sure, but I think it might be because I usually try to take my shots where the camera's metering is bang on, and in many cases this is not good enough.  I need to take more care to think about what I am doing, what the light conditions are, and adjust the exposure, so over or under exposing in order to cope with a large range of contrast.  I take a lot of photographs in the Lake District, where the light can often be cloudy and gloomy.  It would be great to learn how to capture moody atmosphere of those dark clouds on days when shafts of light penetrate through them and light up patches on the fells.

There is a lot of information in this book, and like his book on colours, my initial reactions are that I need to read it again.  Freeman talks alot about measuring light, but does not explain how to do this, so this is something I need to investigate.  I think it would be useful to work through Perfect Exposure treating it as a workbook trying to find the situations that he describes and practise with them.  Hopefully section 4 of TAOP will give me that exposure anyway.

I also need to start using the histograms to check exposure and to view highlight clipping.  

I will come back to Perfect Exposure as I work through section 4.


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