"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enjoin us now on Flickr at flickr.com grroup artof photography welcome to the Art of Photography I'm Ted Forbes and today we're going to talk about exposure now exposure what is it well when you're shooting pictures on your camera exposure is going to be the optimal settings the optimal combination of of settings on your on your on your camera that project the correct amount of light onto whatever your recording device is and a digital camera it's going to be the sensor and a film camera it's going to be your film and so you know why do I need to know this well if you're kind of new to Photography in this day and age certainly these are things you never have to think about because most modern digital cameras or even uh film cameras have meters that advanced enough to put all these settings uh into the camera so you really never have to think about it the cameras are smart enough to know what you're trying to shoot and what really is the optimal exposure setting to get that now it is a computer it's not a human inside a meter and it's not always right and it's not always the desired effect you want to get so how do you determine exposure what are you looking for in a good exposure and how do you control those kinds of things uh maybe sometimes you want something to be underexposed for effect or you want to be Overexposed for effect so we're going to look at those things today and uh I think best illustration is if we look at some pictures okay we're looking at a black and white photograph here and the reason I've chosen a black and white photo for our purposes here is we're talking about exposure and so I want to get all the color information out of here and let's just talk about shades of light or luminance here and uh anel Adams if you're not familiar with him was a famous photographer who produced a lot of work in the 50s who really came up with a system um that grasped control of exposure and his system was called the zone system and it referred mainly to uh uh you know how you were going to get a print out of a negative but it also applies to just general exposure here in our more modern digital cameras um but anyway this is just a general overview of of zone system principle here but anel would divide a grayscale photograph into what referred to as zones of light so at the low end at Zone one you have pure black and at Zone 10 you have Pure White and so you can see in this Photograph uh which is balance that that you have in the really dark shadow areas here go to pure black almost and then some of the highlights on these leaves jump to Pure White so we have black and white and then all the Shades of Gray in between and you can see I've created a gray scale down here and in the zone system each one of these is referred to as a zone so Zone one is black and Zone 10 is white zone five is it's referred to often as middle gray and uh uh more or less what you're going to try and do is have a balance of these tones in your exposure now if you have more contrast in your image you may actually have uh fewer zones and a wider leap between them but when you have 10 zones here each one of these zones is one stop apart is what this is referred to this measurement so one stop stop of light apart so if this image is a stop too dark it won't be quite balanced if it's a stop or two too bright it won't be balanced either now you can use that to uh kind of a creative effect and we'll get into that later that's more of an advanced concept but let's just talk about basic exposure so if I have a well exposed image here which is 10 stops um I'm going to show you what happens here uh as this image is Overexposed now if I let too much light into the camera and I start to overexpose this image you can see right away first of all look at the gray scale this is way Overexposed now all the highlights start to blow out and this is pretty severe case here um and I'm exaggerating for Illustrated purposes but you can see that our you know our black is not black at all it's a middle gray and and we really only have two or three stops of light here um so anyways so back off the exposure if I underexpose an image here it becomes too dark and not only does it become too dark but you can see that all my Shadows start to clip together and I lose all my highlights and uh again you can you can use this to creative effect but right now we're talking about just getting a uh a median exposure uh you can see too if I just start to go up slightly um off of uh off of our our exposure here you can see that the whites clip out really quick and the main concern is you start to lose detail here in your highlights and uh you know to achieve a good exposure you really want to have a balance between detail and and and shades of light now obviously this does apply to color as well um but I've simply removed that from the equation here so you can see just in terms of a gray scale what the light is doing um if you're Overexposed or underexposed okay so how can you control exposure we're going to look at that in the next couple uh podcast episodes but I just want to give you a general view of what you're looking for in a good exposure here so this The Art of Photography and thanks for watchingjoin us now on Flickr at flickr.com grroup artof photography welcome to the Art of Photography I'm Ted Forbes and today we're going to talk about exposure now exposure what is it well when you're shooting pictures on your camera exposure is going to be the optimal settings the optimal combination of of settings on your on your on your camera that project the correct amount of light onto whatever your recording device is and a digital camera it's going to be the sensor and a film camera it's going to be your film and so you know why do I need to know this well if you're kind of new to Photography in this day and age certainly these are things you never have to think about because most modern digital cameras or even uh film cameras have meters that advanced enough to put all these settings uh into the camera so you really never have to think about it the cameras are smart enough to know what you're trying to shoot and what really is the optimal exposure setting to get that now it is a computer it's not a human inside a meter and it's not always right and it's not always the desired effect you want to get so how do you determine exposure what are you looking for in a good exposure and how do you control those kinds of things uh maybe sometimes you want something to be underexposed for effect or you want to be Overexposed for effect so we're going to look at those things today and uh I think best illustration is if we look at some pictures okay we're looking at a black and white photograph here and the reason I've chosen a black and white photo for our purposes here is we're talking about exposure and so I want to get all the color information out of here and let's just talk about shades of light or luminance here and uh anel Adams if you're not familiar with him was a famous photographer who produced a lot of work in the 50s who really came up with a system um that grasped control of exposure and his system was called the zone system and it referred mainly to uh uh you know how you were going to get a print out of a negative but it also applies to just general exposure here in our more modern digital cameras um but anyway this is just a general overview of of zone system principle here but anel would divide a grayscale photograph into what referred to as zones of light so at the low end at Zone one you have pure black and at Zone 10 you have Pure White and so you can see in this Photograph uh which is balance that that you have in the really dark shadow areas here go to pure black almost and then some of the highlights on these leaves jump to Pure White so we have black and white and then all the Shades of Gray in between and you can see I've created a gray scale down here and in the zone system each one of these is referred to as a zone so Zone one is black and Zone 10 is white zone five is it's referred to often as middle gray and uh uh more or less what you're going to try and do is have a balance of these tones in your exposure now if you have more contrast in your image you may actually have uh fewer zones and a wider leap between them but when you have 10 zones here each one of these zones is one stop apart is what this is referred to this measurement so one stop stop of light apart so if this image is a stop too dark it won't be quite balanced if it's a stop or two too bright it won't be balanced either now you can use that to uh kind of a creative effect and we'll get into that later that's more of an advanced concept but let's just talk about basic exposure so if I have a well exposed image here which is 10 stops um I'm going to show you what happens here uh as this image is Overexposed now if I let too much light into the camera and I start to overexpose this image you can see right away first of all look at the gray scale this is way Overexposed now all the highlights start to blow out and this is pretty severe case here um and I'm exaggerating for Illustrated purposes but you can see that our you know our black is not black at all it's a middle gray and and we really only have two or three stops of light here um so anyways so back off the exposure if I underexpose an image here it becomes too dark and not only does it become too dark but you can see that all my Shadows start to clip together and I lose all my highlights and uh again you can you can use this to creative effect but right now we're talking about just getting a uh a median exposure uh you can see too if I just start to go up slightly um off of uh off of our our exposure here you can see that the whites clip out really quick and the main concern is you start to lose detail here in your highlights and uh you know to achieve a good exposure you really want to have a balance between detail and and and shades of light now obviously this does apply to color as well um but I've simply removed that from the equation here so you can see just in terms of a gray scale what the light is doing um if you're Overexposed or underexposed okay so how can you control exposure we're going to look at that in the next couple uh podcast episodes but I just want to give you a general view of what you're looking for in a good exposure here so this The Art of Photography and thanks for watching\n"