Psychology of Exposure
You’re not under-exposing or over-exposing… you’re correctly exposing.
Nailing the correct exposure in camera is thankfully getting easier and easier these days with the incredible technology at our fingertips with digital photography. However, I do still find I have to dedicate plenty of time whilst teaching to make sure people have a thorough understanding of some of the basics. We have gone through this in a couple of different iterations on our Youtube channel Photography Online and it’s well worth a watch to refresh your memory!
My thoughts on this stray more towards our mindset when approaching exposure. Our camera light meters are all set to expose for mid-tones (usually we describe this as a mid-tone grey but any colour can be a mid-tone if it is halfway between pure black and pure white). So when we are presented with a naturally dark or bright scene it will shift our light meters either side of that point in the middle; our midtone. We’ll also see this reflected in our histogram with most tones shifted too one side of the other.
It is easy then to fall into the habit of thinking that as soon as your light meter or histogram reads away from that mid-point or is shifted dramatically to one side of the histogram, that for some reason or another your exposure is incorrect, or that you have somehow done something wrong along the way. This can also be mirrored in the way we describe what we are doing.
Let me try to explain what I mean a little more coherently!
Say you are presented with a high contrast scene - often there are going to be two ways to capture it depending on your subject. If I’m shooting a puffin against bright water I’d probably want to portray the puffin as a silhouette. I’m then going to make the image very dark in order to achieve this. So pragmatically speaking this is underexposing, according to our light meter at least. But in reality by making the image dark, and creating a silhouette I’m correctly exposing the scene to create my desired outcome. Vice versa, if I have a subject in shadow, or a bright bird against a sky, I need to “overexpose” the image to record all the shadow detail I need in the subject. Rather than thinking about this as overexposing it is far more useful to think about it as correctly exposing the image to capture all the detail you want in the subject.
While I understand this may seem like a snobbiness around semantics, for me at the end of the day your approach to image taking should always revolve around why you are taking the picture, the subject and what you want to take precedent. By switching your mindset about exposure to correctly capture the detail you intend too I find it massively helps the overall process and gives you more intention behind everything you do.
Takeaways: Rather than thinking you have under-exposed or over-exposed a photo, switch your thinking to - you have correctly exposed it for the effect you want to achieve. Don’t forget that the only way to ensure you have the “correct” exposure for any scene is using the histogram.
You may look at this and think it is underexposed, but that’s not how I think about it when I see a photo such as this. It has been deliberately shot as a silhouette so for me it is correctly exposed to achieve this result. Even though the histogram may say that there are tones being lost in the shadows you could be fooled into thinking that yes it is underexposed or too dark, but the priority here is the highlight detail and colour, and that outweighs the importance of any shadow detail.