Member-only story

Getting The Exposure You Want For Any Kind Of Photo

Bryn Bonino
7 min readAug 14, 2021

--

Once upon a time, it was a beautiful afternoon in Austin, Texas. I was sitting in a restaurant at a window table across from a business contact who was an amateur photographer. He had brought his camera to our meeting, because he said he wanted to make a natural light photo of me.

The light was beautiful, and it was streaming in the window at just the right angle to create a soft golden effect on those sitting inside. I willingly agreed to have my photo made. But what happened next pained me.

The photographer spent 30 minutes getting the exposure correct. As he furrowed his brow, he said he was playing with the light. Then he got out a hand-held light meter to measure the light near me. He changed his camera settings, and made several more photos of me.

I say all this not to shame the growing photographer, but to point out why the topic of this blog post is important. This post will address how you can get the right exposure every time by using the meter that comes in your camera. This way you won’t have to use a light meter when you are photographing in natural light.

Your Camera’s Light Meter

If you have a digital SLR camera, chances are that your camera has a built-in light meter. This may look like a sliding scale in your viewfinder. Your camera also may show a flashing 2+ or a 2- to tell you that your photo is underexposed or overexposed. Especially when you shoot in manual mode, this built in light meter empowers you to make the photo that you want to make.

To do this, set your camera to spot metering mode. Then also set your camera focus to a flexible spot focus area. This combination of settings will allow you to use your camera’s meter to get a light reading on a specific part of a scene.

To do this, focus your camera on a specific part of a scene, then adjust either your aperture, shutter speed, or ISO in order to get the photo you want to make. In the next few paragraphs I’ll explain these concepts.

Image taken from Hacking Photography

Your Lens’s Aperture

--

--

Bryn Bonino
Bryn Bonino

Written by Bryn Bonino

Educator, marketer, and photographer.

No responses yet

Write a response