Maroon 5 Overexposed Wallpaper
Jan Dominquez
Proper exposure is a fundamental concept of photography. Understanding what it is will improve your work and give you confidence in your skills. Today we will talk about what it means to be overexposed or underexposed, tones and how bright or dark they should be, and when you might want to break the rules!
When humans look at a scene, we see a lot of different tones, from very dark to very bright. Our eyes are amazing and we take in this wide range of tones and sort of blend them together seamlessly in a way that makes sense.
One of the tools we have to see how bright or dark a scene is a light meter. Most modern DSLR and mirrorless bodies have a built-in light meter. It reads the amount of light hitting your subject and bouncing back into your lens.
So now imagine your light meter scale overlapped with a black to white scale. The blackest blacks would be the left side of your lightmeter (-3), the whitest whites would be the right side of your light meter (+3). And in the middle? Zero, also known as a middle exposure also known as middle gray!
If an image is 1-stop below zero exposure, that means your photo has half as much light as it would need to have an 18 percent gray card read as a zero on your light meter. It reads as -1 on your light meter. Some tones naturally appear as 1-stop under-exposed. Royal blue, dark green grass or foliage, red, brown and rose all naturally occur as tones that read -1 in a properly exposed scene.
If an image is 2 stops under-exposed, it has four times less the amount of light it would need to be properly exposed. Put another way, an 18 percent gray card would read at -2 on your light meter. Dark gray, maroon, navy blue, forest green, burgundy, and dark brown naturally occur as tones that read 2-stops underexposed in a correctly exposed picture.
If a photo is 1-stop over-exposed, a middle gray tone is twice as bright as it should be. Tones that are naturally 1-stop over-exposed are deeper shades of pastel yellow, blue, pink, and green. The average Causaian skin tone, fog and a light blue sky will also measure at +1 stops if the scene is properly exposed.
At 2-stops overexposed photo, a middle gray tone is four times as bright as it should be, but pale pastel colors are naturally +2-stops above middle zero. Whites should still have detail (think white fur, clouds, sand and snow), but skin Causian skin is too bright.
My preferred method is to meter off of a known tone in an image and adjust my settings so that tone falls where it should. However, artistic expression is important. And my good exposure might be too dark for your liking.
You may choose to use underexposure or overexposure deliberately to create a certain mood or feeling in your work. Bright and airy photographers often bump up exposure slightly to get that happy go lucky feel.
Dark and moody photographers may shoot dark on purpose to add to the mystery and mood of their work. You can also deliberately underexpose a subject to create a stunning silhouette instead of a ho-hum good exposure.
Work at getting aperture, shutter speed and ISO right in the moment. Know how to avoid accidentally overexposing or underexposing your images and how to do it intentionally. But also have fun playing with post production software to and know how to fix a mistake if it happens.
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