A little photography talk

March 28, 2012

A little photography talk

Day 213

I had a little revelation about my camera and I gained a better understanding about how to meter (measure) the light when taking a picture. There are a few different devises to meter light, one is actually inside of every camera built today. This is how it works. When you point your camera at something to take a picture, the meter sees in black and white and trys to make everything 18% gray. (it is about the same shade as a gray crayon.) Most cameras are pretty fool proof, but sometimes what happens is the picture will still come out underexposed (dark). This is the reason. You first have to imagine the world in black and white. Then when you look at the object you are taking a picture of you would see that it is lighter than 18% grey. Therefore since your object is lighter than grey and the metering device is trying to make everything grey, it will expose the image to make the object darker or more grey.
Here are some pictures to help explain what I mean.

This is my model, Mr. Paper Towel. It is lighter than grey and when I metered Mr. Paper Towel my camera told me that this was a correct exposure. As we all know, it is not correct because it looks to dark .

Here is Mr. Paper Towel again. The only difference is when I metered the light I knew I needed to have a longer exposure (let more light into my camera) so I could record more light coming off of Mr. Paper Towel. Which would make him look lighter in the picture. I actually should have exposed a little longer, oh well.

If you understood my mumbo~jumbo and it helped you understand your camera better, I am glad. If not and you now have a headache, just forget everything I just wrote and enjoy the other pictures in this post :)

Day 214

My Man and Little Squirt went in to get their hair cut. While the lady was cutting Little Squirt's hair, the guard fell off and she buzzed off a patch of his hair. She corrected the mistake and they left the store with 7 free haircuts.