Good exposure - II

Many people have approached me with queries related to Exposure in Digital Photography.

Most of the cameras today come equipped with Automated exposure control. One can see a green color Rectangle on the Mode dial of the camera. Selecting this option will enable you to take quiet reasonably good pictures under normal conditions. However to deal with critical light conditions one has to use other features of the camera to avail optimum quality in the pictures.
To start with –
1. If there is very bright background in the frame (of LCD screen), one will end up with extremely dark faces or ‘Subject’ if we opt for the automatic exposure mode.
2 Similarly on the other side if there is a black or very dark background – selecting Automatic exposure will produce very bright – or rather unnatural brightness of the main ‘Subject’.
In such situations we should take advantage of the other available options in the Exposure menu.
In our camera MENU when we click on EXPOSURE. a drop down menu shows us the following options:

[ 0 EV ],
[+0.3 EV ],
[+0.7 EV]
[+1.0 EV ]
[+1.3 EV ]
[+1.7 EV]
[+2.0 EV ]
these are to increase Exposure.
Similarly we have
[-0.3 EV ]
[-0.7 EV ]
[-1.0 EV ]
[-1.3 EV ]
[-1.7 EV ]
[-2.0 EV ]
these are used to reduce Exposure.

If we use these values wisely we can improve our pictures to a great extent.

In the case ‘1’ above we can increase our exposure by at least +1.0 EV so that our main Subject can appear with normal brightness in the picture.
And in case ‘2’ above we can reduce our exposure by -1.0 EV to get normal brightness of main Subject again.
Fortunately in a Digital Camera we can pre-visualize this on our LCD screen and so can adjust the exposure accordingly.

Another important feature is contrast. In extremely bright Sunlight conditions we find contrast on a higher side. It is better to try with lower contrast also. We can opt from ‘+‘ or ‘O’ or ‘-‘