2010 Senior Portraits San Antonio

If you have ever wanted to improve your digital photography then you may want to consider learning about High Dynamic Range. If you have heard of this term in digital photography, but are not sure what it is, then keep reading because it will serious change the way you look at your digital photography images. What High Dynamic range does in your digital photography is simultaneously lighten your underexposed areas and darken your overexposed areas. Working with your Dynamic Range will aim to create digital photography images as your own eye would see them; even light all over the scene.

In the digital photography world Dynamic Range simply refers to the range of light (luminance) vales from the darkest to brightest. In the real world is really the range of dark to bright sections of light that you can see with the naked eye. This is transferred to digital photography and it given the name Dynamic Range. Digital Photography Dynamic Range is the range of light on your digital camera sensor that can be captured without having the higher light or lower light values altered or edited. In digital photography speak High Dynamic Range simply means a higher range of light values.

You will notice that after understanding Dynamic Range that your digital photography can be improved dramatically and, very fast. Digital photography Dynamic range can improve aspects of your image such as adding a sense of drama to your cloudy landscapes, giving detail to lines of colour, toning down some overexposed parts of light sections of a digital image.

You may find that when photographing things outdoors in your digital photography such as landscapes, beach and snowscapes etc, you have a lot of contrasting highlights that slow your progress down. To overcome sections of high contrast you can use ND filters, a polariser, exposure bracketing, post editing in Photoshop etc, etc, the list goes on what you can do in digital photography but really, to get a more accurate exposure working with your Dynamic Range will be more effective.

You can get a good idea of digital photography Dynamic when you go outside and look at the light. For example High Dynamic Range is the bright sunlight on a typical outdoor, sunlit scene. In saying that, a Low Dynamic Range may correspond to darker areas such as a dimly lit room.

Let?s take my Sony digital camera to use as an example. It has 6 stops of Dynamic Range. The Dynamic range?s objectives are to capture more dynamic range. While it?s easy to capture daylight scenes with the Sony, in some instances like landscapes, more Dynamic Range might be needed. So in this case producing my High Dynamic Range requires that I take some separate exposures. Then I place all of the brightness levels that I want in my final image that my Sony?s sensor can record properly. What this means is putting the darkest values no lower than in the mid-range of the sensors light sensitivity range.

In the wonderful Adobe Photoshop I may decide to take a handful of exposures to cover the complete dynamic range. In each photo exposure I keep the aperture the same (changing aperture changes the depth of field). My aim here is to create different photos making sure that in each I cover the available brightness levels in the landscape.

I take a collection of photos of my landscape at about 1 stop changes in each photo. I don?t do this by altering the f stop I do this via my shutter speed. To check whether I?ve got variation in my exposures I can check the histogram to see whether I have adequately captured the scenes brightness.

Once I have all my exposures in the camera I go home and check it out in Adobe Photoshop. What I should be able to do then is edit them and create a picture as my own eye would see; good lighting on the foreground and good lighting on the background, without over exposure of the sky or underexposure of darker parts of the land.

Have fun and happy shooting!

Amy Renfrey

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The automatic exposure feature on today?s inexpensive digital cameras is often better than the auto exposure was on expensive film cameras 10 years ago. Advances in computers allow a very sophisticated auto exposure brain to be packed into a tiny space in today?s digital cameras.

But even the most sophisticated auto exposure features can sometimes simply make an error or read the scene wrong and set the wrong exposure. The exposure compensation feature of your digital camera enables you to compensate for these mis-readings by making your photos lighter or darker than you would get using auto exposure alone. Here are some tips for improving your digital photos by using the exposure compensation feature of your digital camera.

1. Take a photo and check the exposure ? After you take your photo, review it in your camera?s LCD screen. One of the joys of digital photography is that you can always lighten or darken a digital photo later using Photoshop or another kind of digital photo editing software. However, while you?re still on the scene, why not use the exposure compensation feature to make the correction in the original. Photoshop can darken a picture after the fact, but it can?t bring back details that were lost in an overly bright section of your original photo. If they got washed out when the picture was taken, they are simply not there to bring back.

2. Choose the camera program settings ? You can always use exposure compensation with the fully automatic mode, but there is a better way. If you want to maximize the depth of field, switch to aperture priority and keep the camera aperture small. Of course this will decrease the shutter speed to allow more light to come in to the camera. Be sure the resulting exposure will not be at a shutter speed of less than 1/125th unless you are using a tripod.

If you are shooting a moving object, you?ll have to switch to shutter priority and set the shutter speed fast enough to eliminate blurring ? usually at least 1/400th. Just keep in mind that, when you do this, the depth of field will suffer, so focus carefully on your main subject.

After you?ve selected aperture or shutter priority, take another photo and check the results. If the depth of field and sharpness are acceptable, now it?s time to use exposure compensation.

Most digital cameras allow you to increase or decrease the auto exposure setting by 2 stops in 1/3 stop increments. You?ll have to check your digital camera?s manual to see just how to do it. It varies by camera. Start by adjusting the exposure compensation + 2/3 or ? 2/3, depending on whether your auto exposure photos was too light or too dark. Take another photo and check the results. If it?s still not right, make an additional adjustment to the exposure compensation and try again.

Exposure compensation gives you much more control over the exposure setting so your digital camera. Just remember, once you go to your next photo taking session, to be sure to return the + 2/3 or ? 2/3 or whatever to -0-. Otherwise you?ll get exposure compensation on your next photos without wanting it.

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