I feel very uncomfortable with posting this image. I felt uncomfortable making it.
This is because I knew it is very similar to (but not nearly as good as) Joe Cornish's iconic image from the same location that graces the front cover of his superb book 'First Light'. Even the light, colour and tones are not disimilar to Joes. You can see a Joes image here on his website - www.joecornish.com/products/view_product.asp?catid=408&am...
It feels like plagarism.
So should I have taken it? Should I have posted it? Should I sell it?
I went to the location like just about every other photographer who goes to Skye, because it is such a stunning place. The Cullins are actually much closer to the shore here than most images indicate. Our use of wide angle lenses pushes the mountains into the distance in the image. It was this that struck me most when I first came round the hairpin bend into the small fishing village. The Cullins loom up and dominate the senses.
The 'beach' is boulder strewn in front of low cliffs. At dusk, if the weather blesses you, the Cullin look superb, ominous, splendid. All lenses point towards them in an effort to catch the mood.
Many who go there are thwarted by cloud and rain cloaking the hills, coming away with nothing. Yet the place is so powerful we return again and again in an effort to capture the view.
You will often find a gaggle (or should that be 'a click'?) of photographers all bent on the same mission. On this visit of mine there was at least ten photographers scattered along the foreshore.
So here it was I set up my tripod. As soon as I saw the small layered cliff and the beautiful lichen covered spherical boulder I knew I was standing where Joe did. I understood straight away why he had composed the image as he did and could do no more than make a similar image myself.
Now this bothers me. That my 'take' on the scene was so similar to his. I tried other compositions, some better than others, but this is the one I favored. I do have three or four other images made on the same evening but none I like as much as this one. I think Joe got it dead right, but I would much rather have found something of my own.
So my dilemma is this. Should I have made the image? If I made it (as I did), should I have kept it for my own viewing only or is it okay to display it here and on my own website? Would it be right to offer it for sale to my customers? Is it plagarism?
I once did plagarise an image on purpose. I had seen Pete Bridgewoods image of an old factory in Hull and adored it. I was up in the area and just had to have a go myself. I set out to stand where he stood and then try to process the image as he did - it is a heavily processed image. This was done to learn technique, and because it was an image I love. I let Pete know about it, sent him a copy and it is on my website and here on Flickr. Pete was okay with me selling it, but I am not. It is an almost identical copy of his and while I love it and am pleased to have made it, I will not sell it.
This image is different. I went there, not because of Joe, but because of the place. I didn't set out to get an image so close to Joes. In fact, I was hoping for more stormy, ominous weather with more dramatic lighting to be honest.
I have stood at the side of the River Coupall at the foot of the mighty Stob Dearg and tried to capture the wonderful shape of that mountain with the river and tree in the foreground. So have countless others. We all, well nearly all, go there because it is such a magnificent view and many of us display and sell the results of our trip. It has become a cliched image but why do I not worry about selling my images of it?
I think it is because that while the view is iconic, I have no idea who made the view famous. Who first set up their tripod there, who discovered it? I have no idea and so it doesn't make me feel uncomfortable.
How do you feel about this? Should we view the landscape as ours, 'unplagarisable'? The clouds are never the same, the light is always unique, the waves change - any image, while it can be similar will never be identical in the way text lifted from one writers work and dropped into a students homework is. It is not a copy and paste excercise.
Or, once a particular composition has been captured and made famous by a photographer does that put it off limits as a commercial composition for the rest of us? Should we respect their skill and art, perhaps make a private image for ourselves, but for ourselves only?
How many will be heading up to the Old Man of Storr now the winning image of the Landscape Photographer of the Year 2009 has been announced? How many will try and make a panorama from the same viewpoint. (I climbed up there last week in the dark and have come back with some images I am reasonable happy with. Just hours later at a cafe, the owner gave me my first glimpse of the winning image in the local Skye paper - I am relieved to say the composition is totally different to mine and yet while I was up there I saw a photographer moving his tripod around from the very area where the winning shot had been taken. Coincidence? Or, had he seen the image and was now trying to recreate it? I have no idea. Whatever, I just hope his horizon is straighter! :) ).
I would really appreciate your thoughts on my issues here. I haven't made up my mind and could do with some wise guidance.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
An inspirational photographer
As always I love to see the work of other fine photographers and came across John Cornforth - his website displays some breathtaking landscapes and wildlife imagery - please hop over there and immerse yourself in beauty
http://www.cornforthimages.com/
http://www.cornforthimages.com/
How do I find out if my pictures have been on the front page of Explore?
Monday, October 26, 2009
How to Photograph Stars
This is the result of me experimenting.
I took Stan out for his final pee before bedtime (oh the joys of owning a puppy) while staying in the tiny fishing hamlet of Badachro near Gairloch in Scotland.
It was during my now well rehearsed urgings for him to get on with the job in hand (why is it that before a dog can pee or poo the bit of ground has to smell right for them?) that I looked upwards and was immediatley rendered breathless.
I can honestly say I have never seen the night sky looking so stunning. In such a remote place there is almost no light polution. On sucha crystal clear night the sky was ablaze with stars - the Milky Way Galaxy a haze across the sky above me.
All thoughts of scampering upstairs to get under the duvet were shelved staright away. There was no way, no matter how late, I was going to bed with this above me.
I have never photographed the night sky before so had to learn quickly.
To get this shot I broke most of my usual rules as a landscape photographer.
First I banged the ISO up to 800. Usually when a landscaper works in low light as I often do I stick at ISO50 for low noise quality and use long, sometimes very long, exposures. However if the expposure is longer than say 15 to 30 seconds the stars have moved (or the Earth has moved... or both have moved) so much the stars stop being points of light and become streaks. Unless you want those long star trail images this looks awful.
I figured noise is of little concern when what you are photographing in some ways looks like noise anyway. So ISO 800 it was.
Then I stopped the lens wide open to f2.8 - I was using my 16-35mm f2.8 L lens to get the sweep of the galaxy across the image.
Again, as a landscaper I am normally working at f16 or f22 for front to back sharpness - depth of field. But here it just seemed to me that depth of field is irrelevant. We are talking about infinity. So I used f2.8 to let as much light in the lens as possible to keep the shutter speed as fast as possible and manually set the lens focus to infinity (and beyond!!!! sorry, ot carried away there but I do love Buzz Lightyear).
I framed the image to include something to anchor the image, in this case a neighboring home on the hillside surrounded by trees. I knew these would just silhouette as there was no light there to capture, no matter how long the shutter was open.
I then guessed some exposure times and this image came from an exposure time of 30 seconds.
I was stunned looking at the images later in Lightroom to see what the camera had captured. I love this image. It takes me back to that wonderful night and the hour and a half I spent playing with settings trying to capture what I was seeing. One of those memories I will always treasure.
I learned a lot ina short space of time just by thinking 'out of the box' (hate that phrase) and got great satisfaction from working out a set of settings that worked for me to get the image I was visualising.
I have seen some shots taken in the USA desert similar to this with rock formations providing the foreground silhouette. My foreground isn't as spectacular but it still means a lot to me.
If ever you are far up north in Scotland or somewhere similar, I really urge you to have a go and see what you get. I guarantee it will be unforgetable.
I took Stan out for his final pee before bedtime (oh the joys of owning a puppy) while staying in the tiny fishing hamlet of Badachro near Gairloch in Scotland.
It was during my now well rehearsed urgings for him to get on with the job in hand (why is it that before a dog can pee or poo the bit of ground has to smell right for them?) that I looked upwards and was immediatley rendered breathless.
I can honestly say I have never seen the night sky looking so stunning. In such a remote place there is almost no light polution. On sucha crystal clear night the sky was ablaze with stars - the Milky Way Galaxy a haze across the sky above me.
All thoughts of scampering upstairs to get under the duvet were shelved staright away. There was no way, no matter how late, I was going to bed with this above me.
I have never photographed the night sky before so had to learn quickly.
To get this shot I broke most of my usual rules as a landscape photographer.
First I banged the ISO up to 800. Usually when a landscaper works in low light as I often do I stick at ISO50 for low noise quality and use long, sometimes very long, exposures. However if the expposure is longer than say 15 to 30 seconds the stars have moved (or the Earth has moved... or both have moved) so much the stars stop being points of light and become streaks. Unless you want those long star trail images this looks awful.
I figured noise is of little concern when what you are photographing in some ways looks like noise anyway. So ISO 800 it was.
Then I stopped the lens wide open to f2.8 - I was using my 16-35mm f2.8 L lens to get the sweep of the galaxy across the image.
Again, as a landscaper I am normally working at f16 or f22 for front to back sharpness - depth of field. But here it just seemed to me that depth of field is irrelevant. We are talking about infinity. So I used f2.8 to let as much light in the lens as possible to keep the shutter speed as fast as possible and manually set the lens focus to infinity (and beyond!!!! sorry, ot carried away there but I do love Buzz Lightyear).
I framed the image to include something to anchor the image, in this case a neighboring home on the hillside surrounded by trees. I knew these would just silhouette as there was no light there to capture, no matter how long the shutter was open.
I then guessed some exposure times and this image came from an exposure time of 30 seconds.
I was stunned looking at the images later in Lightroom to see what the camera had captured. I love this image. It takes me back to that wonderful night and the hour and a half I spent playing with settings trying to capture what I was seeing. One of those memories I will always treasure.
I learned a lot ina short space of time just by thinking 'out of the box' (hate that phrase) and got great satisfaction from working out a set of settings that worked for me to get the image I was visualising.
I have seen some shots taken in the USA desert similar to this with rock formations providing the foreground silhouette. My foreground isn't as spectacular but it still means a lot to me.
If ever you are far up north in Scotland or somewhere similar, I really urge you to have a go and see what you get. I guarantee it will be unforgetable.
Taste is a funny thing
Just back from two weeks in Scotland. Week one spent in the Gairloch area on the mainland west coast and week two on glorious Skye.
I am pleased (and relieved) to have come back with a good haul of images I am pleased with. Lots of processing to be done, just frustrating to come back to an inbox of requests and loads of jobs lined up - suppose I shouldn't complain, the landscapes will have to wait a while.
I downloaded to my laptop the memory cards each night while we were away and sorted the images, deleting the rubbish. I then grade the images to focus in on the ones to work on.
It was while I was doing this I began to think about taste and what a funny thing it is.
Take this image for example. Elizabeth, my wife, Stan the dog and I took a walk one afternoon through the woodlands owned by the National Trust for Scotland opposite their lovely gardens - Inverewe - at Poolewe on the West coast, just north of Gairloch. It is a gentle walk climbing into the wooded hills and took us a couple of hours or so with photographic stops.
The cloud cover gave good soft light under the canopy. Autumn colours prevailed. I came upon this scene. Vivid moorland grasses dying to glorious gold under the conifers. The breeze making the grass flow and sway. I just had to stop and set up the tripod. F22 for front to back sharpness. 15 seconds exposure to gather the needed light and to emphasize the flowing motion of the grass. I thought no more of it... until I downloaded the image.
Now, on this holiday, I was privileged to get good light at classic locations, like Elgol, Rannoch Moor, Glencoe, Sligachan, the Fairy Pools, Talisker Bay and so on. Wonderful dramatic places.
And yet, this image held my fascination each time I saw it. Not a glorios dramatic location. Certainly not a well known place of pilgrimage for photographers as Elgol or Sligachan are. A simple image.
And still, by the time we were ready to travel home with over 300 images to process, this remains one of my absolute favorites from the trip. I love the colour. I love the flowing grass. I am pleased with my composition making the most of the grass using just the base of the tree truncks as a foil to the soft flow.
Taste is a funny thing. I have uploaded the image to Flickr to see what the World thinks. I don't expect many comments or favorites. It is not a dramatic image. The colour is not that striking and the scene is simple and unremarkable in many ways. It doesn't worry me that this is the case. I am sure all of us have images which are special to us - they just tingle our taste buds of the mind and our interest in them lives on long after some of our more dramatic images have fizzled away in our consciousness.
I have a feeling I will always love this image. No one else may, but that doesn't matter because taste is a funny thing.
I am pleased (and relieved) to have come back with a good haul of images I am pleased with. Lots of processing to be done, just frustrating to come back to an inbox of requests and loads of jobs lined up - suppose I shouldn't complain, the landscapes will have to wait a while.
I downloaded to my laptop the memory cards each night while we were away and sorted the images, deleting the rubbish. I then grade the images to focus in on the ones to work on.
It was while I was doing this I began to think about taste and what a funny thing it is.
Take this image for example. Elizabeth, my wife, Stan the dog and I took a walk one afternoon through the woodlands owned by the National Trust for Scotland opposite their lovely gardens - Inverewe - at Poolewe on the West coast, just north of Gairloch. It is a gentle walk climbing into the wooded hills and took us a couple of hours or so with photographic stops.
The cloud cover gave good soft light under the canopy. Autumn colours prevailed. I came upon this scene. Vivid moorland grasses dying to glorious gold under the conifers. The breeze making the grass flow and sway. I just had to stop and set up the tripod. F22 for front to back sharpness. 15 seconds exposure to gather the needed light and to emphasize the flowing motion of the grass. I thought no more of it... until I downloaded the image.
Now, on this holiday, I was privileged to get good light at classic locations, like Elgol, Rannoch Moor, Glencoe, Sligachan, the Fairy Pools, Talisker Bay and so on. Wonderful dramatic places.
And yet, this image held my fascination each time I saw it. Not a glorios dramatic location. Certainly not a well known place of pilgrimage for photographers as Elgol or Sligachan are. A simple image.
And still, by the time we were ready to travel home with over 300 images to process, this remains one of my absolute favorites from the trip. I love the colour. I love the flowing grass. I am pleased with my composition making the most of the grass using just the base of the tree truncks as a foil to the soft flow.
Taste is a funny thing. I have uploaded the image to Flickr to see what the World thinks. I don't expect many comments or favorites. It is not a dramatic image. The colour is not that striking and the scene is simple and unremarkable in many ways. It doesn't worry me that this is the case. I am sure all of us have images which are special to us - they just tingle our taste buds of the mind and our interest in them lives on long after some of our more dramatic images have fizzled away in our consciousness.
I have a feeling I will always love this image. No one else may, but that doesn't matter because taste is a funny thing.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Poladroids
When using the Poladroids software to convert jpegs into Polaroids I find it is best to crop the Jpeg square first in your image editing software so that you can control the image that will appear within the Polaroid frame.
Just a wee hint.
Just a wee hint.
Polaroid Creation Software from Jpegs
I love polaroids.
There is someting about the simplicity of the images and the retro feel which I find appealing. My Dad had one when we were kids, although he was too tight to spend much on film so he didn't take that many images with it, but they still remind me of holidays and family events from my childhood.
I have considered buying a second hand polaroid camera on EBay, they are readily available. However I was delighted to find a piece of free software on the web which creates 'Polaroids' like the one above from Jpegs taken with any digital camera.
You can download Poladroid from the website here - http://www.poladroid.net/index.php andplay to your hearts content.
It is easy to use once you have worked out its quirks and you even have to grab the image with your mouse cursor and shake it about on the screen like we used to with real polaroid images when they came out of the camera. You decide when to stop the development process and re-save the resulting jpeg.
Now I am itching to go out with my 50mm lens and take quirky images which I think will work well with the software. Watch this space!
There is someting about the simplicity of the images and the retro feel which I find appealing. My Dad had one when we were kids, although he was too tight to spend much on film so he didn't take that many images with it, but they still remind me of holidays and family events from my childhood.
I have considered buying a second hand polaroid camera on EBay, they are readily available. However I was delighted to find a piece of free software on the web which creates 'Polaroids' like the one above from Jpegs taken with any digital camera.
You can download Poladroid from the website here - http://www.poladroid.net/index.php andplay to your hearts content.
It is easy to use once you have worked out its quirks and you even have to grab the image with your mouse cursor and shake it about on the screen like we used to with real polaroid images when they came out of the camera. You decide when to stop the development process and re-save the resulting jpeg.
Now I am itching to go out with my 50mm lens and take quirky images which I think will work well with the software. Watch this space!
Friday, October 2, 2009
Another fine website
I have just come across another photographer whose website is well worth browsing - some stunning images - that of Helen Dixon
http://helendixonphotography.co.uk/index.html
http://helendixonphotography.co.uk/index.html
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Inspirational Website
Just a quick post to encourage you to visit this guys website - he has some beautiful images. I am especially drawn to his detail shots and abstracts. His name is Harley Goldman. Take a look and see what you think.
http://harleygoldman.com/HarleyGoldman/default.htm
http://harleygoldman.com/HarleyGoldman/default.htm
What does 'exposing to the right' mean?
You sometimes hear the expression, ' I expose to the right', but what does it mean? Does this photographer have a thing about mooning conservative politicians? Well, they may have, but this is not what they mean.
They are talking about using the histogram on the cameras monitor to maximise the information the camera captures by controlling the exposure.
Many photographers, especially those new to using digital SLR's seem nervous about both shooting in RAW mode and in using the histogram. If this is how you feel, don't worry, I did too but it really is a lot simpler than you think and it will improve the quality of your images on screen and in print massively.
I have talked about RAW in other posts which you can go back and read, but simply put, the RAW file holds every single piece of information about the image that the camera captured when you pressed the shutter. If you switch to jpeg you throw away a big chunk of information about light, colour and tone from the image making it harder to work on images later on the computer and any changes you do make will be noisier and of poorer quality. Why would you be happy doing that? So step one is shoot in RAW if your camera supports it.
Next, what is the histogram? It is just a graph. Nothing to be afraid of. Look in your cameras manual for how to turn it on, on your particular model.
This graph just represents tone in the image. The left side represents the pure black in the scene. The right side of the graph represents pure white. The height of the graph at any point along it simply represents the number of pixels in that image at that tone. The heights of the graph are not important, forget it. It simply represents whatever you have photographed. It is the left and right sides that we need to focus on.
The reason for exposing to the right is that there is far more information for the camera to record in the right hand end of the graph. In fact, in the 25% of the graph on the right hand side the camera can capture as much data as in the whole of the 75% to the left hand side put together. So if your shot falls 25% short of the right hand side of the graph, imagine how much of the detail and richness of the image you are losing.
Now it is really important to overcome a big hangup many of us have with the monitor on the back of cameras. If you expose to the right the image on the back of the camera will look flat, washed out and possibly awful. If you let the histogram finish in from the right hand edge the monitor will look wonderful with rich colours and contrast. You have to trust that this is deceiving you. You have to overcome the urge to make the image look great on the monitor. In fact, even when you open the files on the computer, initially the underexposed images will look better, but we are being fooled.
It is one of the most common mistakes of beginners to underexpose images because they look more colourful. I still find myself doing it sometimes, but the best images are correctly exposed, balanced, representing what was actually there, not some gaudy technicolour aberration so often seen in Flickr galleries that show dayglo, fluorescent sunsets - not 'real' sunsets. They show foliage in autumn woodlands that look they were planted beside Chernobyl - glow in the dark leaves, not natural autumnal beauty. Resist the urge to under expose images or to process them to produce unnatural colours.
Select the image exposed to the right to work on in your software and as you apply the tools in Lightroom and Photoshop (or Aperture, Elements, Gimp or whatever you use) you will See a far better final image. Trust me. This is because you have allowed the camera to capture all the data and are now using the software to reveal it in all its glory.
This screen shot of Lightroom shows an image I have been working on for a customer. You can see the histogram for the image at top right marked with a red number 1. This is similar to the one you will get on you camera monitor.
This image is 'exposed to the right'. The histogram is touching the right hand edge of the graph. In fact it goes a bit beyond it. If you look closely at the image you will see some small bright red areas. I have the 'Over exposure' warning switched on in Lightroom - this turns areas that have over exposed and gone pure white (which means there is no detail at all there) into red (This red is not printed or shown when you display the image, it just shows in Lightroom so you are aware of it and can correct it with one of the sliders in Lightroom which can recover detail from these areas).
The reason in this image I have left those areas over-exposed is because I was shooting a table setting with items made of silver and naturally where bright light hits silver it does go pure white - it is supposed to, it is what makes the metal sparkle, just like chrome on a car bumper (fender). The sun, if it is in your shot will always overexpose - there is no detail the camera can capture on the surface of the sun, it is just too bright. So don't try and eliminate these highlights.
It is important to realise that the histogram on your camera relates to the image on the screen. This image is actually a small jpeg that you camera creates from the file for the photograph you have just made, even if you have shot it in RAW. This is to save space and is because the monitors on the back of cameras are still very low quality so a high res image would be wasted on it.
As this is the case, if you are shooting RAW, you can actually push the image a bit further to the right and still retain the detail - the preview on the camera will show it as over-exposing but in actual fact the RAW file can go about 1 more stop to the right than a jpeg. However, I mostly try not to go beyond the right of the histogram unless I feel I have to, to be on the safe side.
To expose to the right I work in full manual on the camera. If you prefer you can work in aperture or shutter priority but I firmly believe you will get better images working in manual.
Decide on the aperture you need to get the shot you want - a higher f number ( a narrower aperture) if you want lots of depth of field, a lower f number (a wider aperture) if you want a faster shutter speed or some nice bokeh (blurred background).
Then using the lightmeter in the camera viewfinder (or on the live view screen if you have one), adjust the shutter speed to bring the light meter gauge into the centre position and take the shot. Now look at the histogram. What are you looking for?
Look at the right hand edge - is the graph JUST touching or just a minute distance from the left hand end of the graph. If the answer is 'yes', then you have exposed to the right. Simple. If it ends some way from the right hand edge you are under exposing, effectively losing data. So slow your shutter speed down a little more, one or two clicks of the wheel if it is quite close to the right hand edge of the histogram, more clicks if it is some distance away - you will soon get used to how many clicks you need to get it right. Re-frame and re-take the shot and check the histogram again. If it is JUST touching the right hand edge, fine. If it now shows a line right up the right hand edge you have gone too far so speed up the shutter by a click or two and retake the shot.
It may take a few shots to get the histogram correct. Most DSLR's also have, buried in one of the menus, an option to turn on something that will be called 'highlight warning' or over exposure warning - something like that. Turn it on. What you will see on the monitor is areas in the shot that have gone pure white and over exposed will flash red at you - many of us call this 'the blinkies'. This helps give a visual warning that you have exposed too far to the right.
For each click that you turn the wheel on your camera that slows or speeds up the shutter speed on most modern DSLR's you will be increasing or decreasing the shutter speed by one third of a stop. In the menus there is often an option to change this to half a stop per click or even one full stop per click, but set it to a third of a stop per click if you can as this gives you much finer control over exposure.
If you see a histogram with all the graph bunched up over to the left you are either well under exposing and need to slow the shutter speed down or it may well be that there is little in the way of bright information in what you are photographing. You need to take this into account when using the histogram. If you are making an image of a black cat in a dark coal cellar there is unlikely to be many bright pixels in the image so the histogram will be bunched to the left. If you are doing a close up, filling the frame, with a brides white dress in a well lit room the histogram will be bunched to the right because there will be almost no black pixels in the scene.
The key is to adjust the exposure so you capture as much information to the right of the histogram as possible. Don't worry if the lightmeter in the camera is telling you it is all wrong - that you are over or under exposing - trust the histogram.
The preview on the camera may well not show you detail that you see before you, but by exposing to the right you have to trust that the camera has captured all this information and you can bring it out in your image processing later and you have given the software the maximum amount of data on image tone, light and colour you can so the final image will be the best you can make it.
So have a go. Practise exposing to the right. Trust the histogram. Don't trust the preview image on the monitor, or the images when you first download them to your computer.
On your computer, use image processing software that displays a histogram and select the image to process as the one that is exposed to the right even though it WILL look worse than others you have downloaded which are slightly under exposed. The final image will be better. Sometimes a little better but ofter a lot better.
Have fun!
They are talking about using the histogram on the cameras monitor to maximise the information the camera captures by controlling the exposure.
Many photographers, especially those new to using digital SLR's seem nervous about both shooting in RAW mode and in using the histogram. If this is how you feel, don't worry, I did too but it really is a lot simpler than you think and it will improve the quality of your images on screen and in print massively.
I have talked about RAW in other posts which you can go back and read, but simply put, the RAW file holds every single piece of information about the image that the camera captured when you pressed the shutter. If you switch to jpeg you throw away a big chunk of information about light, colour and tone from the image making it harder to work on images later on the computer and any changes you do make will be noisier and of poorer quality. Why would you be happy doing that? So step one is shoot in RAW if your camera supports it.
Next, what is the histogram? It is just a graph. Nothing to be afraid of. Look in your cameras manual for how to turn it on, on your particular model.
This graph just represents tone in the image. The left side represents the pure black in the scene. The right side of the graph represents pure white. The height of the graph at any point along it simply represents the number of pixels in that image at that tone. The heights of the graph are not important, forget it. It simply represents whatever you have photographed. It is the left and right sides that we need to focus on.
The reason for exposing to the right is that there is far more information for the camera to record in the right hand end of the graph. In fact, in the 25% of the graph on the right hand side the camera can capture as much data as in the whole of the 75% to the left hand side put together. So if your shot falls 25% short of the right hand side of the graph, imagine how much of the detail and richness of the image you are losing.
Now it is really important to overcome a big hangup many of us have with the monitor on the back of cameras. If you expose to the right the image on the back of the camera will look flat, washed out and possibly awful. If you let the histogram finish in from the right hand edge the monitor will look wonderful with rich colours and contrast. You have to trust that this is deceiving you. You have to overcome the urge to make the image look great on the monitor. In fact, even when you open the files on the computer, initially the underexposed images will look better, but we are being fooled.
It is one of the most common mistakes of beginners to underexpose images because they look more colourful. I still find myself doing it sometimes, but the best images are correctly exposed, balanced, representing what was actually there, not some gaudy technicolour aberration so often seen in Flickr galleries that show dayglo, fluorescent sunsets - not 'real' sunsets. They show foliage in autumn woodlands that look they were planted beside Chernobyl - glow in the dark leaves, not natural autumnal beauty. Resist the urge to under expose images or to process them to produce unnatural colours.
Select the image exposed to the right to work on in your software and as you apply the tools in Lightroom and Photoshop (or Aperture, Elements, Gimp or whatever you use) you will See a far better final image. Trust me. This is because you have allowed the camera to capture all the data and are now using the software to reveal it in all its glory.
This screen shot of Lightroom shows an image I have been working on for a customer. You can see the histogram for the image at top right marked with a red number 1. This is similar to the one you will get on you camera monitor.
This image is 'exposed to the right'. The histogram is touching the right hand edge of the graph. In fact it goes a bit beyond it. If you look closely at the image you will see some small bright red areas. I have the 'Over exposure' warning switched on in Lightroom - this turns areas that have over exposed and gone pure white (which means there is no detail at all there) into red (This red is not printed or shown when you display the image, it just shows in Lightroom so you are aware of it and can correct it with one of the sliders in Lightroom which can recover detail from these areas).
The reason in this image I have left those areas over-exposed is because I was shooting a table setting with items made of silver and naturally where bright light hits silver it does go pure white - it is supposed to, it is what makes the metal sparkle, just like chrome on a car bumper (fender). The sun, if it is in your shot will always overexpose - there is no detail the camera can capture on the surface of the sun, it is just too bright. So don't try and eliminate these highlights.
It is important to realise that the histogram on your camera relates to the image on the screen. This image is actually a small jpeg that you camera creates from the file for the photograph you have just made, even if you have shot it in RAW. This is to save space and is because the monitors on the back of cameras are still very low quality so a high res image would be wasted on it.
As this is the case, if you are shooting RAW, you can actually push the image a bit further to the right and still retain the detail - the preview on the camera will show it as over-exposing but in actual fact the RAW file can go about 1 more stop to the right than a jpeg. However, I mostly try not to go beyond the right of the histogram unless I feel I have to, to be on the safe side.
To expose to the right I work in full manual on the camera. If you prefer you can work in aperture or shutter priority but I firmly believe you will get better images working in manual.
Decide on the aperture you need to get the shot you want - a higher f number ( a narrower aperture) if you want lots of depth of field, a lower f number (a wider aperture) if you want a faster shutter speed or some nice bokeh (blurred background).
Then using the lightmeter in the camera viewfinder (or on the live view screen if you have one), adjust the shutter speed to bring the light meter gauge into the centre position and take the shot. Now look at the histogram. What are you looking for?
Look at the right hand edge - is the graph JUST touching or just a minute distance from the left hand end of the graph. If the answer is 'yes', then you have exposed to the right. Simple. If it ends some way from the right hand edge you are under exposing, effectively losing data. So slow your shutter speed down a little more, one or two clicks of the wheel if it is quite close to the right hand edge of the histogram, more clicks if it is some distance away - you will soon get used to how many clicks you need to get it right. Re-frame and re-take the shot and check the histogram again. If it is JUST touching the right hand edge, fine. If it now shows a line right up the right hand edge you have gone too far so speed up the shutter by a click or two and retake the shot.
It may take a few shots to get the histogram correct. Most DSLR's also have, buried in one of the menus, an option to turn on something that will be called 'highlight warning' or over exposure warning - something like that. Turn it on. What you will see on the monitor is areas in the shot that have gone pure white and over exposed will flash red at you - many of us call this 'the blinkies'. This helps give a visual warning that you have exposed too far to the right.
For each click that you turn the wheel on your camera that slows or speeds up the shutter speed on most modern DSLR's you will be increasing or decreasing the shutter speed by one third of a stop. In the menus there is often an option to change this to half a stop per click or even one full stop per click, but set it to a third of a stop per click if you can as this gives you much finer control over exposure.
If you see a histogram with all the graph bunched up over to the left you are either well under exposing and need to slow the shutter speed down or it may well be that there is little in the way of bright information in what you are photographing. You need to take this into account when using the histogram. If you are making an image of a black cat in a dark coal cellar there is unlikely to be many bright pixels in the image so the histogram will be bunched to the left. If you are doing a close up, filling the frame, with a brides white dress in a well lit room the histogram will be bunched to the right because there will be almost no black pixels in the scene.
The key is to adjust the exposure so you capture as much information to the right of the histogram as possible. Don't worry if the lightmeter in the camera is telling you it is all wrong - that you are over or under exposing - trust the histogram.
The preview on the camera may well not show you detail that you see before you, but by exposing to the right you have to trust that the camera has captured all this information and you can bring it out in your image processing later and you have given the software the maximum amount of data on image tone, light and colour you can so the final image will be the best you can make it.
So have a go. Practise exposing to the right. Trust the histogram. Don't trust the preview image on the monitor, or the images when you first download them to your computer.
On your computer, use image processing software that displays a histogram and select the image to process as the one that is exposed to the right even though it WILL look worse than others you have downloaded which are slightly under exposed. The final image will be better. Sometimes a little better but ofter a lot better.
Have fun!
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