Nature Photography Photo Workshop

6.5. EXPOSURE FOR LANDSCAPES

You'll experience wildly varying lighting conditions shooting grand scenic vistas. Sometimes exposure is simple and straightforward; most of the time it's not. Depending on your composition, you need to carefully determine the ideal exposure settings to produce a captured file with correct tonal values and as much image data as possible.

• Whenever possible, don't underexpose. Underexposing a digital capture results in much less data than a correct (or slightly overexposed) capture.

• When in doubt, "shoot to the right" of the histogram. If you can't nail the exposure dead-on, it's actually better to be a little bit overexposed. Your camera histogram will show when there's more image data to the right (toward the highlights) than toward the shadows at the left. Remember, more captured light equals more data in the image files. On the computer, it's much easier to work with a digital image that's overexposed than one that's underexposed. Just make sure to avoid clipping the highlights (as discussed in Chapter 3).

If you're working in Aperture Priority (Av), you'll adjust shutter speed and/or ISO to get the correct exposures. In Full Manual mode, you can adjust all three settings independently. If you pay close attention to your exposures you will soon find you can quickly adapt to changing lighting conditions and your photos will look much better, even before processing.

6.5.1. EXPOSURE VARIATION

At times, you'll compose a shot and the camera meter will ...