The Exposure Trick That (Almost) Never Fails!

The three shots above definitely have one thing in common. They're all difficult to meter. At Yellowstone National Park, all the pictures from the "front side" of the geyser were way too cliche. Getting away from the masses, I found this couple sitting on a trailside. The backlighting of the water was glorious, and there were dark shadows in the foreground. With the limited dynamic range of today's digital cameras, getting the right exposure becomes absolutely critical. The Griffith Observatory in the hills over downtown LA presented a similar challenge, though this time the only backlighting was a faint glow in the blackening evening sky. The windows with their incandescent glows cast a bold, almost candlelight orange hue to complete the scene. The church with a diffraction fringe around the top of the steeple completes the set of three problem lighting conditions. Though there are a lot of tricks of the trade that can be employed to bring out all of these shots, but it's not about post processing using photoshop layers, shooting in .raw and tweaking the levels, or using auto bracketing. Whenever you're faced with a difficult contrasty landscape scene like these there's amazingly simple cure to help nail critical exposure. Meter the sky.

Seeing the Light

A big part of successful photography is pre-visualization. PBS put together a documentary on Ansel Adams where Ansel talked about his images. Instead of using the phrase "take" a picture, he described how he would "make" a photograph that would capture the image he saw in his mind's eye.

In this photograph, elements of strong lighting and linearity bring together dramatic elements that help make the image pleasing to the eye. When I pre-visualized the picture, the elements that stood out to me in my mind's eye were the two triangles formed by the sides of this "urban canyon" as it recedes back to the vanishing point. Shape and balance and depth all play a role in making this image aestheticly pleasing. None were obvious to the casual bystanders, who for the most part took snapshots of their friends with their backs up against the railing instead.