Part 4 - Exercise 1

Measuring Exposure

This exercise is all about measuring and altering exposure and seeing the effect it has on the resulting photograph.

Part 1

Part 1 consists of different subjects, each of which are deliberately lighter or darker than the average exposure.

I had to under expose what the camera recommended for average metering in this shot. this is due to the large expanse of dark background. In practice I should probably underxposed by another 1/3 stop as the skin of the subject still looks slightly bleached.

I had to overexpose here by 1 stop due to the large expanse of very bright sky which the camera wanted to compensate for - this would have left the fence very dark.

This phot also needed to be overexposed - this time by over 1 stop.

Here the photograph needed to be underexposed so that the white objects weren't bleached out against the grass which was quite dark in the shadow of the house. This required 1 2/3 compensation.

This dark phone on the very bright windowsill required a full 2 stops overexposure.This way the brightness has been captured.

The camera wanted to compensate for this dark scene by making it brighter. I had to underexpose by 1 2/3 stops in order to capture the scene as I saw it.

This photograph needed to be overexposed because the camera wanted to darken the bright white scene. By overexposing, I captured the scene as I saw it.

Part 2

Part 2 consists of taking 5 different exposures of a number of different subjects [In practice I only ended up doing this for one subject, but I thought I'd learnt enough on this already].

Each of the below subject start with the "correct" exposure at average metering, followed by +2/3, +1 1/3, -2/3 and -1 2/3 (these were the variants which it was easiest to do on my camera).

This photograph has the "correct" exposure, the white of the ball is bright white (perhaps completely bleached out at it's brightest point), the black handle is also completely black. There is a balance of tones inbetween.

Despite being slightly overexposed, this shot is perhaps closest to what I think I saw - perhaps because it was a very bright day

At over exposure by 1 2/3 stops, the scene is very bleached out in areas and quite a lot of detail is lost.

This shot contains the most detail in the subject, but the power of the sunny day is lost and the grass is quite grey

At 1 1/3 underexposed the photograph does not look too dark necessarily but is definately different to what I saw.