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Seeing In Zones For Preciseness In Your Photos
Back in 2011 I got my first DSLR camera because in a 6-month period I’d be traveling to 3 countries. I wanted to be able to capture the sights I’d see on my travels. I liked so much being able to witness the world through the frame of my camera, that I made sure I wove photography into my doctoral research, which I started writing the next year.
I found myself getting lost in seminal works such as On Photography by Susan Sontag. And I created my own research structure, which I called a critical visual ethnography. I remember explaining that for my data collection, I would make photos in manual mode so that I wouldn’t distort too much what the scene looked like in reality.
I think back to my reasoning and realize now how little I knew.
What I know now is that every photo is a representation of what’s going on in reality. Because of the capabilities that a photographer has to author an image, all photos manipulate reality in some what. In this blog post I’ll explain how you can interpret the light in a scene in order to communicate what you want in your photo.
How Your Camera Sees
Any photo is in part authored by your camera. So it’s helpful to understand how your camera sees. In my last blog post, Getting The Exposure You Want, I talked about how your camera’s built-in meter will allow you to know when your camera settings are set so that the light will be balanced.
But what does balanced mean for your camera?
In short, your meter will say that it’s balanced when the lightest part of what’s being measured is middle grey. This is halfway between white and black. When your camera knows that it can hold middle grey as a constant, this allows your camera’s built-in light meter to tell you if your settings will make the photo overexposed or underexposed.
If you use an automatic metering setting on your camera, if the subject of the photo is nearly black, then the rest of the scene will be lightened. Inversely, if the subject of the photos if nearly white, the rest of the scene will be darkened…
