Exposure
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Exposure can cause more problems for beginners than any other aspect of photography. When you're learning photography, everyone tells you the cardinal rules are 'don't overexpose the highlights and don't block out the shadows'. Rubbish.
Sure, most of the time you want to avoid overexposing your images, but sometimes there is a contrast range that you just can't cope with - such as here. The dark patches are many stops darker than the bright patches where the sunlight was falling on the leaves. I decided to expose for the leaves and record the bright areas as a mid-tone. This forced the shadows off the bottom of the scale and caused them to block out. But I'm not worried. The extra drama added by the contrasty lighting works better than had there been flat even lighting across the scene.
The moral of the story is don't rigidly stick to the 'rules'. It's a cliche, but they were made to broken.
In other news, today I re-launched my website. I've spent the past few days redesigning and re-building it to make it look fresh and new, and not quite as heavy as they previous incarnation. Go and take a look at photopositive.co.uk and let me know what you think.
Posted By: photopositive | Comment (4) | Nature | Permalink
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