Okay, now for some lessons about exposing images using your digital camera - with the help of an article over at the Luminous Landscape website.
If you’ve been having difficulty with getting the proper exposure on your digital SLR, perhaps it’s because there’s a tendency to slightly underexpose the image. We all learned, way back when, that overexposure is a bad thing. Once those highlights are gone, they’re gone. Burned away. Fzzsssst.
So, as we transition to using our new Nikon D2X, D200, or Canon 5D and 1DS Mk2, we are also making sure not to overexpose, to avoid the “blinkies” on the LCD, to make sure that histogram is not too far to the right.
Well, you still don’t want the “blinks” (indicating overexposure), but getting that histogram over to the right a bit is not as harmful as you might think it is. Read this article by Michael Reichmann at the Luminous Landscape.
The short of it is that if we make our exposures biased towards the left of the histogram, then we are not allowing the camera to capture all the tonality that it is capable of receiving, especially in the highlight area. Slightly overexposing the image and then pulling back the exposure using a RAW convertor (this applies only to RAW images - with JPEGs, all bets are off) results in an image that contains greater tonality. What this accomplishes is a couple of things: highlight data that is seemingly gone is actually there (and recovered) and the noise and “posterization” is reduced in the darker area of the image.
Anyway, read the article and send me any questions you have.
See, I knew digital was better than film.
