In Focus Vol. 3 No. 1

Exposing Exposure

Helpful and simple guidelines to reduce processing time and make more money capturing and printing your images.

By Grant Oakes

Remember when you could photograph a wedding, drop the film into a bag, send it to the lab, and in a week or so have a set of proofs you could put into a proof book and you were done? Then the digital thing happened and everything changed.

Your frame count went through the roof, you had to edit your images, adjust your files, and correct the color, all before the proofing was done. I’m exhausted just thinking about it!

The digital revolution has definitely changed what we do, some for the better, but some for the worse. Does it need to be this way? Is it possible to get back to a simpler way of doing what is known as “workflow” and spend less time on those tasks that became a reality once the switch was made to this new, glorious medium? I believe that it is.

For starters, get it right in the camera! Proper exposure, white balance, composition, and cropping will markedly improve the quality of your images while saving loads of time and money. Imagine what would happen if you were to absolutely nail it with every image you took and had very few rejects. You would have very little post-production time.

While it might seem a tall task to be perfect on every shot, we can certainly use the tools built into our cameras to get closer to perfection, thereby cutting short the work spent in post-production. Exposure is critical with digital, even if you shoot in your camera’s RAW format.

Use the exposure compensation to properly expose the image so you don’t have to adjust it later in Photoshop.  The camera doesn’t know how much light is falling on the subject, only how much is being reflected back onto the sensor.

Most images reflect about 18% of the light falling on them, hence the phrase “18% reflected gray.”  If you have a groom in a black tuxedo leaning up against a dark walnut-paneled wall, for instance, the camera will try to lengthen the exposure or open up the aperture to make it neutral gray, which winds up blowing out his skin tones.

You have to think in gray scale and compensate by underexposing the image by between 1 to 2 stops, depending on how dark the tones are. Just the opposite applies to the bride in the beautiful white dress by the white marble pillars. The camera will underexpose her and try to make her neutral gray, so you have to use the exposure compensation and open up 1 to 2 stops, depending on how bright the scene is.

Once I learned this, the percentage of images that needed to be adjusted went down significantly, thereby reducing my work on the back end of the process. Practice this with various scenes to get an idea of how much to adjust for each image based on the tones of the image you are photographing.

Then, when you’re out in the field it will become second nature for you to get much closer to hitting the exposure just right. The old time-is-money adage is true, so if you spend less time in front of the computer, fixing your files you’ll have more time promoting your business or shooting, thereby generating more money.

Grant Oakes is the proprietor of Images by Grant Oakes in Aurora, Colo., as well as the founder and developer of Tafota.com, a new Internet service that allows photographers a quick, seamless, professional, and simple way to maximize their Web presence.