PixelatedImage Blog

We’re a little late releasing this most recent eBook; since Craft & Vision started I don’t think we’ve had a month without at least one release and March 2011 just slid by without so much as a peep. Today we’re announcing the book that’s taken us so long to come out with.

Last September I met Piet Van den Eynde in Ladakh (Piet is pronounced Pete. Or Peat. Or Peet. But not Pie-Et. That’s just wrong. Europeans spell weird but they aren’t crazy)  as we traveled together through Ladakh. Over the course of those two weeks he continually astonished me with the breadth and depth of his post-production knowledge and skill, as well as his ability to teach it, and English isn’t even his mother-tongue. He was really excited when we agreed to publish with him but I don’t think he knows how excited we were to be getting a teacher of his calibre. Dude knows his stuff and teaches really clearly.

So today we’re announcing The Power of Black & White In Adobe Lightroom & Beyond, A Masterclass, by Piet Van den Eynde. This is a huge book. It’s 100 spreads, so the equivalent of what we used to call 200 pages. Frankly it’s large enough to be a proper print book that you’d shell out $30 for on Amazon. (Note: This extended size means you’ll buy it once for the same ridiculously low price as always, but you’ll be downloading it in a few sections. It’ll take a little longer to download but this way should present less problems for everyone.)

But size shouldn’t be why you buy it. Bigger isn’t always better, sometimes it’s still crap, just more of it. Not in this case. The value comes from learning from someone as skilled as Piet is. When we released Andrew Gibson’s Black and White eBooks, the response was amazing – and it should be, they’re excellent books that we’re proud of – but we also got a lot – I mean A LOT – of feedback saying, “When are you going to do something more specifically for Lightroom?” The answer is: now.

I’m not going to recap the book’s content – all you need to know is that it’s full of incredible teaching and will take you some time to chew through it, but by the time you’re done you’ll know more about great black and white conversions – and not the egghead stuff that uses numbers and secret-handshakes in photoshop – than you ever thought you’d know. And for $5 you aren’t going to get this kind of value anywhere else.

But wait! There’s more! Because Piet spends a little time talking about the power of plug-ins like NiK Software’s Silver Efex pro, NiK has ponied up 3 full versions of Silver Efex Pro, which anyone that buys this masterclass is eligible to win if you buy the book within the first 5 days, which also happens to be the time frame during which you can get the book for $4, or buy 5 ebooks for the price of 4.

Special PDF Offer
For the first five days only, if you use the promotional code BWLIGHT4 when you checkout, you can have the PDF version of The Power of Black & White in Adobe Lightroom & Beyond (A MASTERCLASS) for only $4 OR use the code BWLIGHT20 to get 20% off when you buy 5 or more PDF ebooks from the Craft & Vision collection. These codes expire at 11:59pm PST April 16, 2011.

Well, the day is upon us. The final book in the vision trilogy is out and Amazon has started shipping it – which means others are soon to follow, and places like Amazon.ca and other Amazon.co.uk should have them heading out within a month. I can’t tell you how excited I am to have this done and out there as a body of work. So excited I want to give 3 signed copies away. But you have to keep reading to find out how that’s going to happen. No cheating and going straight to the end!

Anyways, the video (click the screenshot above and it’ll take you to Vimeo) is a quick intro to the book, hopefully it’s helpful in giving you a feel for what the book is and is not. It’s not very well scripted, mostly because after an hour of out-takes I was bound and determined to get it done in one take.

I mention this briefly in the video but it deserves more than a passing mention. It’s been 14 months since Within the Frame was released and in that time so much has happened. The community that gathers around this blog has grown significantly, I’ve had a chance to meet some of you, travel or photograph with others, and become friends with many of you. Writing books that no one reads was not one of my life goals and the audience that has sprung up around the books, eBooks, and this blog has truly humbled me; I’m deeply grateful and I want you to know that. As such, this book is dedicated to you. The dedication reads:

For the amateurs – the lovers – those who do this for the love of the image and the journey of getting there. This is for everyone who loves this craft, whether you draw a paycheque from your efforts or not. For everyone who has ever created an image just to say, “Look at this!”

Vision & Voice, along with the others in the vision trilogy – Within The Frame, and VisionMongers – is available at Amazon.com HERE or from your favourite bookseller

Want one? Want it signed? Leave a comment in the comments section, make sure your name and email are there and I’ll do a draw for three copies which I will sign and mail out to you before I go to Iceland towards the end of the month.

Last night, under cover of darkness, Adobe rolled out Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3. And there was much rejoicing. It was fun to watch people quietly realize it had been released, order it and begin to play with the new features. For the first time in my life I was on the inside of a secret little club, complete with NDAs and letters from lawyers and stuff, so that meant I could finally start talking about it. Phew. I hate keeping secrets.

I’ve been living with Lr3 in its various incarnations for months now because Vision & Voice, Refining Your Vision in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, the third in the vision trilogy, is based on Lr3. So now is a good time to tell you what Vision & Voice is and is not and how it fits into your learning curve for Lr3.

First, Lr3 isn’t – on the outside – vastly different from Lr2. If you know and love Lr2, Lr3 will be an easy upgrade for you. That doesn’t mean it isn’t better. It is. It’s faster and leaner and the image quality, especially with noise, seems noticeably better to me. Most of the tools are the same, though the Post Crop Vignetting has been ratcheted up a couple notches, there’s Grain, and the new ability to remove lens distortion is going to rock people’s worlds too. Import is noticeably different as well.

So, is Vision & Voice the book you want to learn Lightroom 3?

Well, it is and it isn’t. Vision & Voice was written with Lightroom 3 in mind. The screenshots are all from Lightroom 3. But the purpose of the book was not to completely unpack the software for you. In fact I never once leave the Develop module. So Importing, doing slideshows, printing, and making fancy web galleries – you’re on your own and there are bound to be great books out there that teach you those things better than I could. Vision & Voice was written to discuss the aesthetics possible with Lightroom, to help you find a process that works for you but that begins with discovering and articulating your vision for the image and then using the best tools to get there in your workflow. I call it Vision-Driven Workflow. It’s not a system, just an adaptable process to refine your vision in Lightroom.

Will Vision & Voice work for Photoshop, ACR, or Aperture 3 users?

Well, I’ve never used Aperture 3 but like Nikon and Canon cameras have some differences but are essentially just cameras, so too I think are the leading post-processing programs. Basically it comes down to what they call the slider and how you accomplish one change or another, but if you are willing to do a little translation work in your brain, the principles I explore in the book are absolutely transferable. There’s a large-ish chapter in the middle about the specific tools in Lightroom 3 itself, but again I think you can read that with your preferred software open in front of you and get some good learnin’ in.

What about LR2? Surely you aren’t abandoning the Luddites?

Lr3 and Lr2 aren’t profoundly different in the way you do 98% of your development, and this book is all about development. Don’t sweat it. If you use Lr2 you’ll feel right at home with this book.

But I don’t need all this vision-stuff, I just wanna make my pictures look better, man.

This is where I began with this book. So many of us seem to approach our post-processing with the “just make it look better, man!” mentality. I pushed back and said, until we define what “better” means, I can’t help you and you can’t help you. You have to know what your own intent for the image is before you start heading in that direction. So I discuss that. And then we look at 20 of my own images, work through them together from beginning to end. I’ve provided 20 DNG files that you can download when you get the book and work alongside me from beginning to end.

Will we learn really fancy Dave-Hill techniques and Recipes for Awesomeness and the latest Un-Suck Filters?

No you won’t. Shame on you for asking.

When does the book come out?

It went to press last Friday. Should be in my hands by end of the month or the first few days of July. Then it’ll begin shipping from various retailers. Folks who pre-order through Peachpit’s website will get theirs first. Amazon orders will arrive after that.

What if I want to learn Lightroom 3 right now?

Well, my first stop is always the NAPP and that’s where I’ll send you. No doubt the blogosphere is about to explode with posts about new features and they’ll be great, but my go-to place for learning is Kelby and the gang. Go to the NAPP Lightroom Learning Center.

A couple months ago we released Andrew S. Gibson’s The Magic of Black & White – Part One, Vision. Andrew’s clear teaching and passion for his medium were accompanied with great images and it’s become one of the best-selling titles in our library. I’ve had a ton of emails asking when the second book is coming out and it’s today!

Part Two picks up where Part One left off and discusses converting the captured image into spectacular monochrome and toned images that really pop. If you’ve wanted to get more comfortable with the digital black and white darkroom, this is a great step. Clearly illustrated with more of Andrew’s great images, and well taught (Andrew’s a technical editor for the UK’s fantastic EOS Magazine), the second part of this series is a great addition to the library.

As always we’re doing what we can to share the love. So until end of day on June 01, use codes MAGIC4 to save $1 on the new book, or MAGIC20 to get 20% off all books when you buy 5 or more. Use the buttons at the bottom or click HERE to mosey on over to the Craft&Vision general store for all yer eBook needs.

Yesterday I submitted the last of the words and images for the last book in the trilogy – Vision & Voice: Refining Your Vision in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Hard to describe how excited I am to be done not only this book but the whole series. Harder still to believe that it’s been less than a year since the first one, the poorly acronymned Within The Frame, rolled out. Have no idea what I’ll do with all the time, other than travelling, shooting for clients, and continuing to offer the eBook at Craft&Vision.com. Might be time to begin the fourth book. Hey, if it was good enough for Douglas Adams to do a trilogy in four parts, it’s good enough for me.

Anyways, Vision & Voice. At the beginning of Within The Frame I explained my thought that there are really 3 images that go into the creation of the final photograph – the first is the one you envision, the second is the one you shoot, and the third is the one you refine in the darkroom. The better you are at the second two, the closer you can come to the first. Within The Frame was about the image you capture, Vision & Voice is about refining that image in the digital darkroom, specifically Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

Vision & Voice is not a recipe book full of ways to make your images look “cool” or “better.” In fact that was really one of the premises of the book; to create a book that provided a newer way of looking at post-production than what we’re often told. What we hear so often is. “How do I make my images look better?” What we should be doing is looking for something more for our photographs. We need to define “better.”  An image to me is only better when it gets closer to my intention (vision) for the image. If the photograph looks the way I envisioned it, if it makes me feel the way I want it to, then it has a chance at making others feel that too, and that, to me, is better. But how we get there will mean different things to different people. That’s what Vision & Voice is about.

The first half of the book is the part where I drone on and on about visual language and the myth surrounding the “did it really look like that” notion, and the tools in Lightroom and what they do. It’s a little like Within The Frame in that sense. Or my blog for that matter. I hope it comes off with the same sincerity as Within The Frame does. In fact I hope all three books work together along similar lines. The second half of the book is the rubber-meets-the-road part of the book. I walk through about 20 of my own photographs, identify my intent for the image, and then walk you through the process to get there. It’s a full-on how-to kind of book but always connected to the why-to. How come? Because why you do something in post is more important than How and there are always 10 ways to get to the Why. And because these images are congruent with my style and the point is not to teach you how to make images that look like mine. The point is for you to work through the images – with DNG files suppplied online for download so you can work on the same files – and learn the Why and the How, so you can then work on your own files with fresh eyes and a new paradigm – the vision-driven workflow.

So there you go. It’s done. More or less. A few edits here and there, and then some tweaks and the book should, fingers crossed be on the presses early June for July delivery. You can pre-order it now from the link above. If you’re in a hurry, pre-order it with the publisher – Peachpit Press – you’ll get it faster. But it’ll still be in July.

One last thing. I dedicated this book to most of you. It’s dedicated to the Amateurs, the ones who do this for love of the craft whether or not a pay check is involved. Your enthusiasm, persistence, and sheer quality of work constantly humbles and inspires me. To all of you who sent emails or tweets or Facebook comments with encouragement over the past 2 years, which is how long I’ve been writing this trilogy – from the bottom of my heart, thank you. I still believe we have one of the best growing communities of passionate photographers and all around great human beings here on this blog and that’s because of you. Thank you.

At the risk of more jokes about how y’all can’t read as fast as I write, ahem, Amazon.com now has my third book for pre-sale. It has for about a week, but I was holding out on telling you. So, for the uber-impatient among you, here are the links to the book on Amazon, and on Barnes and Noble. I had planned to do three books over the course of three years, but the folks at Peachpit put RedBull in their water cooler.

Vision & Voice is the third in what I’ve been thinking of as a trilogy, three books bound together by the common theme of vision, but addressing different facets of photography. Within The Frame is about the vision-driven capture, VisionMongers is about the vision-driven career, and Vision & Voice is about the vision-driven digital darkroom. Y’all will be forgiven if you never want to hear me use the word “vision” ever again.

I began Within The Frame by stating that I believe there are three images that go into making the final photograph – the one you envision, the one you shoot, and the one your refine in post-production. The better you are at the latter two, the closer you’ll come to the first. Vision & Voice is about the role of the digital darkroom, specifically Adobe Lightroom, in refining our vision. It’s not a how-to use Lightroom book, though the exercises will help you learn Lightroom. It’s not even a “how do I make my images look better?” book, because that’s the problem with the whole thing. Any book that tells you how to “make your image look better” would first have to know what “better” means, and as only you know your intention for an image, I think it’s best we look at the tools in the digital darkroom through the metaphor of voice. You first have to know what you want to say before you can go about deciding how to say it. Then you choose the right tools, the right voice, to express those intentions.

So I’m working furiously on this now, and it’s easily the most daunting project to date. The release is due in the later spring sometime, May 24 according to Amazon. If you’re counting, that’s 3 books in one year and I’m getting tired, so I trust you’ll all be OK with me taking a breather and hiding on a beach in the Maldives or something for a while once the third book in the trilogy roles off the press in May.

Thanks for being on this ride with me. Churning out these books, having them so beautifully realized by my publishing team, and so enthusiastically received by you, this has been an unforgettable year. I have the best photographic community in the world and I don’t take it for granted – thank you! Thanks also for the response to yesterday’s post. If you’ve not read the comments, you should take some time to do so – seems there are many of us swinging back to film and reaping the creative benefits. My buddy Kevin Clark has a 4×5 camera I might steal from him and play with. It’s been a while since I’ve had this much fun stirring the paint. Much of this stuff,and the resulting images, will be going into the 2nd volume of The Inspired Eye. But don’t hold your breath, that one will come in the new year.

Reading through Vincent Versace’s book, Welcome To Oz, was both a liberating and educating experience for me. While other voices were telling me that should do things one way, Vincent’s book came along at the right time and told me I was free to do it another way. Of course, that’s not how he put it at all, but he does things in a way that felt intuitive to me, and so gave me permission to do things “my way.” That’s the long way of saying that I like what Vincent teaches and I like how he teaches it. So when I started watching his new DVDs it was a little like coming home. I haven’t watched nearly all of them because Vincent puts a lot on these things, and the stuff he teaches isn’t remedial – it’s solid stuff that takes active learning to absorb and adapt – but I wanted to point you to them before the pre-order pricing of 59.95 per title expires.

So rather than go over the whole thing, I want to point you to Vincent’s DVD’s here. The new ones are Welcome To Oz 2.0, Lesson One and Lesson Four, and you can find them HERE along with pre-order pricing. You also get a free copy of OnOne’s fantastic selective focus plug-in FocalPoint, along with some other plug-ins.

I’ll let you go to Vincent’s site to read the descriptions. What I love about what Vincent teaches is that he takes the notion of serving your vision to the logical extreme. The man is a master craftsman with a profound respect for the print and the techniques that get you there. If you’re looking for a masterclass in post-production work that touches heavily on some of the stuff I talked about in Drawing The Eye, Vincent’s the man. Like I said, it’s not remedial, and it’s not fluffy, but it’s huge bang for the buck in terms of education, and the free software takes it over the top.

While we’re on that subject, OnOne software just announced Plug In Suite 5 which won’t ship until next month but that can – like Vincent’s DVDs – be got on discount if you pre-order. More information is HERE on the OnOne site. I have only recently started using this suite and am loving the possibilities it brings to my work. Even the frames, which I didn’t think I’d have much use for, are truly fantastic, and FocalPoint rocks. Photographers with consumer clients will get tons of bang-for-buck out of Plug In Suite 5, which you can demo or purchase on the OnOne site HERE

Last Friday I posted a short slideshow of images shot in Lamayuru, Ladakh. Thanks to all for the kind words left in comments and sent in emails. There were a number of requests for a how-to, so I’ll do my best to be helpful. Truth is there isn’t much to tell in terms of technique. I pointed the camera and let it do it’s thing while I worried about not getting trod on by a horse, donkey or yak. In situations like this the meter on my 5D does remarkably well. But remember, HOW I meter is not as relevant as what the histogram looks like. I shoot first, meter later. Sort of. HERE’s an article on that.

I shoot in AV, chose an aperture (f/16 in the case of the image above, ISO 100, 1/100sec- (see, the “Sunny 16 Rule” really works!), then check the histogram and try to balance the dark shadows and the bright backlit sun. But here’s the thing – perfect exposures are not what these images are about. These images are about mood, so I wasn’t afraid to blow the exposure, plunge the shadows, or even get way too much lens flare. I grabbed my 5D instead of my newer 5D MkII because it’s my kick-about camera; with the 17-40 lens on it I honestly don’t care what happens to it, so I take more risks, and don’t mind burying it in the dust and chaff of harvest. If you study my work you know I tend towards simple, clean compositions. This was an intentional departure, having already shot some harvest scenes that were front-lit, perfectly exposed, and boring & lifeless (see below).

I post-processed these (the slideshow images not the image above) in Lightroom with very few tweaks. In some cases I made the blacks darker. In most cases I added vignette, pushed the clarity slider way to the right, and added some fill light. In other cases still I pulled back the saturation and bumped the vibrance. I don’t have a formula, just the desire to retain or finesse the dusty, luminous feeling of a warm autumn day in the gold of the barley fields. That’s the key, and it’s what forms the spine of the book I am working on now to compliment Within The Frame.

Within The Frame was primarily about capturing your vision within the camera. The next book, the one after VisionMongers, is about capturing your vision in the digital darkroom of Adobe Lightroom. Most books out there answer the question, “how can I make my photograph look better.” Instead, this next book ask the question, “How can I make this image express my vision?” It begins with being conscious of your vision, the feeling you want to express in your image. Sure, adding contrast might be the answer. Or it might not. Begin with your vision for the image, and play in the darkroom until you’ve brought the digital negative into alignment with that. Forget the recipes and shortcuts, and instead learn what each setting does to the aesthetic of the image. Just the same as you do in camera.

I hope this is helpful in some way. I know it’s vague. Between you and I, I think the reason these images work is because I took the risk of getting in there, shooting against the light and pushing my face (and camera) around in the dust and dirt. As my portfolio fills up with safer images, I find myself drawn more and more to the need to express myself with less perfection and more mood. Perfection is over-rated and seldom touches the heart.

In a follow up to yesterday’s post about exposure and the histogram, I thought I’d highlight a couple things.

I had a question in the comments asking whether Nikon had a similar metering mode to centre-weighted average, they do. I just don’t know the name of it. But that’s the thing – it doesn’t matter. Pick the metering mode that seems to work best for your camera, but then forget about it – what matters is the histogram, not how you get there.  Now, obviously there are exceptions. There are times for precise metering. But this is the way I do it 90% of the time, if not more.

All this really assumes you’re shooting RAW and will be going into the digital darkroom to finesse your final image. If you are shooting JPG you need to be WAY more particular about your metering because the moment you hit the button the camera throws away all kinds of information and tweaking it later will reveal the weakness of the digital negative MUCH faster. I know there are some nutty folks out there still shooting JPG, but I don’t get it. For me and my image needs, I shoot RAW.

You also need to know that when the camera shows you a histogram it’s actually showing you a histogram for a little JPG preview it’s created just for this. It dumbs the image down and then shows you what it looks like. So if you clip the highlights a little you’re probably safe bringing them back in LR or Aperture. Assuming you’re shooting RAW. So don’t be a total freak about this. You have about a stop to play with in most circumstances before those blown highlights are really, really, blown highlights.

There are circumstances wherein the blown highlights need to stay in the image. If the sun is in the photograph, your histogram will have blown highlights. The sun IS a blown highlight. Same with any specular highlights in the image. A glint of light off of silverwear or the chrome fender of a car, for example. If you try to exposue so that the histogram has no lost information on the right the whole image will be so dark you’ll have defeated the purpose of this whole thing – because the mass of your information will now be in the leftmost half, which means less actual information and a poorer digital negative.

Glad this has helped so many of you. We’ve got a funeral tomorrow so I won’t be posting. See you – most likely – back here on Thursday. Could be Friday. Let’s see how Wednesday plays out.

After Friday’s post on how I deal with white balance, I got a nice email from Ryan Marco asking me about how I go about metering. He asked a lot of good questions about how I determine where and how I meter the light in a scene. Many of you might have the same questions. And I’m about to disappoint you with my answer. I just point the thing and shoot.

First some background. When I shot film I got very good at taking readings off anything that was middle grey, or close to it, and then, using the Zone system, making adjustments from there. Those were simple times. I never used a handheld spot meter, never got too bent out of shape about things, and bracketed a stop in either direction when in doubt. It didn’t hurt that I was using mostly negative film with a broad dynamic range.

So when I tell you my approach to metering in digital leans to the side of simple, you know the background. As with white balance issues, life is just too short for neuroses on this matter. I lean towards the artist more that the geek most times anyways.

But here’s the bigger issue; it doesn’t matter. I suspect I’m going to get in trouble for this, so the caveat is that this is what works for me. But the thing is, digital capture is different than film. What matters, assuming you’re going to take the digital negative into the digital darkroom, is getting the best digital negative. The best digital negative is not the one that looks perfect on the LCD screen. It’s not the one where you nail the exposure using a spot meter. It’s the one (wait for it, this is paradigm-shifting stuff, here) that has the most digital information, even if it looks like crap on the LCD.

I cover this in Within The Frame (pg 44-46) but let me take another stab at it here.

The more digital information in that digital negative, the more able you are to create a final print with greater quality, less noise, and more awesomeness. So before I go into this, you need to remember: the image on the LCD will most likely look like crap. That’s OK. Use the LCD to preview composition and focus, and then pay attention to the histogram to determine exposure.

How do you know you have the best possible digital negative with the most digital information? The histogram. Forget studying your metering modes and learning the fancy voodoo light mojo. Learn to read your histogram, that cryptic graph of peaks and valleys on the LCD screen. You might have to consult your manual to find out how to access this. For most Canon DSLRs you just press the preview/play button and then the info button once or twice until your histogram appears.

This is the histogram from Adobe Lightroom, but the one on your LCD will look similar. The histogram above represents a scene captured with no blown highlights – notice the mountains and valleys don’t go off the right-side of the chart – and no plunged shadows – notice the data doesn’t go off the left-side either.

Now, I’m going to assume you know nothing about the histogram. It’s a graph, that’s all it is, and it’s deceptively simple. that graph represents the light values in the scene you’ve just captured at the exposure values you’ve captured it at. On the far left are shadows with no details, totally plunged shadows of darkness. On the far right are highlights with no details, total burned out whiteness. And between those two extremes are all the tonal values from black to white. The height or shapes of the peaks and valleys, for this exercise, don’t matter. Ignore them. You can do something in-camera with where the peaks and valley sit from left to right, but can’t do a thing about their height or shape. That’s the scene. Ignore it.

Why the histogram matters now gets – for a moment – a little more complicated. It’s logical that as long as you get the whole scene into the box of the histogram – neither wildly over nor under-exposed – you can tweak the rest in Lightroom and be done with it. Simple, perfect exposure, right? Wrong. You’ve created a digital negative but not a good one. Why? Because the histogram reflects some quirky math that can only be understood by wizards and occultists, and it doesn’t respond to the logic of mortals like you and I.

Remember I said the best digital negative was the one with the most information? Well the right half of the histogram is capable of storing exponentially more information in it than the left half. WAY more information. And the right quarter of the histogram, WAY more than the other three combined. How much more? Again, I’m simplifying, but if the right quarter of the histogram can hold 2000 levels of information, the quarters to the left of it can hold 1000, 500, and 250 respectively. There isn’t much information at all in the darks. That right quarter of the histogram can hold twice what the rest of the entire histogram can hold.  It’s a WAY bigger bucket, can hold more information. More information means better image quality and more flexibility in the digital darkroom before noise becomes an issue.

So what do you do with this knowledge?

Here’s how I approach exposure. First, I shoot on AV mode or Manual almost 100% of the time. I leave my metering on whatever your camera’s equivalent of centre-weighted average is. Then I take the shot. Click.

Before you look at the images/histograms: I did this in Lightroom as a simulation only and it’s meant to be an illustration, so don’t get hung up on the EXIF displayed on the histogram, it won’t change and will only confuse you. Look at the image relative to the how the information is distributed in the histogram.

I look at the histogram. Way too dark. Barely has any information in the right half, never mind the rightmost quarter. Then I use the EV+/- function on my camera, push the exposure a stop, try again. Click.

Getting better. But while the image LOOKS OK-ish on the LCD screen, the histogram is telling me otherwise. It is still, in terms of a good digital negative, underexposed. So I go back to my EV +/- and bump it another stop. Click.

Much better. Might be a little light for my taste, and where’d my clouds go? Doesn’t matter, I know they are there because none of the scene has disappeared off the edges of the graph. You’ll bring them back in Lightroom or Aperture. Look at the histogram – it’s where it should be, as far over to the right without going off the end. What matters is that now you have LOTS of digital information.

Now I have a digital negative with as much information as possible I can bring the image into the darkroom and adjust it as necessary. In this case I like the luminosity of the boat and the ocean but it was the clouds in the initial scene I loved and have lost. Should have had an ND grad filter in my pocket but didn’t. So in this case I’ll use the gradient filter in LR to darken the sky and punch the clouds – Clarity rocks for this. I’ll make a few more tweaks – including a grad filter along the bottom with Clarity set to -100 to soften foreground waves, and the brush tool with bumped exposure, brightness and clarity to pop the sails.

Here’s the final image (crappy composition and all)

So the name of the game is getting to know your histogram so you can create the best possible digital negative. And the best possible digital negative is what, class? The one with with the most information. There will be times when you have a scene with a larger range of tones than the camera can capture. In this case you have options; several of them. Decrease that range with the use of ND grads to reign in the highlights, or a flash to pop the shadows. Or you might take 3-5 bracketed exposures and bring them together in Photomatix or Photoshop. Or you can just make a choice to create an image with either plunged shadows and/or burned out highlights. (page 45 in Within The Frame has a great example of an image with a histogram that goes wildly off both ends.)

My way isn’t the only way, I’m sure of it. But it’s what works for me. I used to meter then shoot, now I shoot then meter. “Same, same, but different,” as they say in Asia. Does this help? Questions?

If this was helpful and you want more, or if my lunatic ravings didn’t convince you, I urge you to spend $9.95 and download Darwin Wiggett’s article Expose Right. You can find that article HERE on Darwin’s site. Highly recommended.