Using exposure creatively

Using Exposure Creatively

Once you have an understanding of how the exposure triangle works and begin to manually experiment with aperture, shutter speed and ISO, you'll gain much more creative control when taking photographs.

Reading a Histogram

Getting to grips with adjusting the settings of your camera manually is well worth doing, as it gives you the opportunity to have total control over how a photograph will look. It will also help you when you're shooting using automatic settings, as you'll have a greater awareness of exactly what the camera is doing.

As well as the exposure triangle, being able to read a histogram is another way to better understand how a photograph has been exposed. Most cameras can display a histogram of an image after it's been shot, and some cameras are able to show a live histogram before you take the shot.

The levels of shadows will be shown on the left, your highlights on the right, and your mid-tones in the middle.

If the shadows are much more prominent than the highlights and the detail is clipped at the left side, it indicates your photograph is underexposed. Similarly, if the highlights are more prominent than the shadows and the detail is clipped at the right side, it is overexposed. For correct exposure, you want the graph to show detail distributed more evenly around the mid-tones, and unclipped.

High Key or Low Key?

For example, a high-key image is made up predominantly of the higher, whiter tones. The histogram will show a lot of detail being pushed to the right side.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, a low-key image is more shadowy and dark, and will be represented in a histogram with higher levels on the left side.

Your Assignment

Have a go at creating a low-key image and a high-key image.

Observe the differences in the histograms, and experiment by manually adjusting the settings to bring out the shadows more for a low-key image - or the highlights more for a high-key image.