subject: 3 Tips to Get Right Exposure for Landscape Photography [print this page] 3 Tips to Get Right Exposure for Landscape Photography
The most critical technique for landscape photography is about getting the correct exposure. The photographic tool has limited capacity to record certain range of lighting. People eyes can see high range of color tone from shadow to high light but camera sensors or films can not do that. Therefore, the major obstacle of landscape photography is variety of lighting while photographing. Moving from darkness to brightness area of scenes showing differences in lighting conditions can result in various exposures of each area, often more than even the best equipment can handle. This article will demonstrate you several ways to cope with various lighting conditions in the landscape photography to get the right and amazing landscape shots.
Firstly, one solution is to average lighting from two or three areas in the scene characterized by similar levels of lighting. The classic number of area is 3, the first one for a shadow tone, the second one for a highlight tone and the last one for areas with medium intensity lighting called mid tone. At this point, using a spot metering from cameras helps you find the correct 3 exposure values for each area and then average lighting value where you want to give more importance on the final images. This method requires a lot of experiment and experience and it will be a lot easier for a digital camera to do than a film camera because you can see the result right away.
Secondly, a better approach is to use graduated ND filters whose purpose is to balance the lighting between shallow and highlight areas therefore overall lighting is more homogeneous and manageable from the camera.
Thirdly, using modern digital cameras and good image editors as Photoshop, GIMP, etc can solve the problem of extreme lighting condition by shooting different shots, each with the correct exposure for a particular area of the scene and then put them together into a single image in a post-production phase. Final photos produced from this digital process are called "High Dynamic Range" or "HDR. It may take time to do this digital process but it can give you truly amazing photographs.
