Gordon Wildman Photography < prev Tips next >
5:
Snow and Bright Light
 How the typical camera meter works is by reading the light off of the scene you are aimed at and then making a judgment for you on the tonal values of a scene to give you the "proper exposure". These meters are set to read the scene so as to give you the "proper settings" to achieve what is known as 18% gray, which is simply saying to read the scene to be middle gray. So if you pointed at a middle gray card, the exposure given to you would allow the gray card to show up as the same gray tone, and allow all the other tones to fall into place - whites white and blacks black, when you see the image. Now when you aim your camera at a scene that has a lot of white in it like snow, a sandy beach, or the sun, your meter is reading those bright tonal values and saying to itself I must make this scene middle gray which makes snow look murky or gray instead of white. So relying simply on the meter to know how to handle the exposure you're trying to achieve is not enough. The photograph on the right is a good example of this - just point your camera at a snow covered scene and your picture will come back under exposed. On the left the image looks more as our eyes see it, with natural whites. Generally speaking an increase of a half to one and a half stops from a typical meter reading will do the job. Meters today are getting more sophisticated and doing a better job of reading scenes as we see them because of computer chips, but they still need our assistance. It is imperative to understand that the camera does not interpret light the way we do. |