Exposure Compensation

Exposure compensation allows photographers to override exposure settings picked by your camera’s light meter to darken or brighten images before they are captured. Since camera meters work by evaluating light reflected off subjects and are standardized on middle grey, any time a camera is pointed at something very dark the meter will work the opposite way by brightening up the exposure while a very bright subject will cause the meter to darken the exposure. This is done to get as close to the middle grey as possible so that the resulting image is not too dark or too bright. While this works out quite well in most cases, one might experience overexposure or underexposure in more challenging lighting conditions where the camera meter might be adjusting the exposure too aggressively. This is where exposure compensation comes into play, with the photographer manually taking control of the brightness of the image and overriding it using the exposure compensation feature of the camera.

HDR Photos

HDR is an abbreviation for High Dynamic Range. HDR photography is a technique that helps you get details in the brightest and darkest parts of your photographs; more so than if you took just one photograph with your camera. When photographers want to capture photos that exceed the capabilities of their cameras, they use the HDR photo process to capture the full dynamic range of images. By bringing different exposures together, you can make the most of every pixel so images more closely resemble what the human eye can perceive.

Exposure Bracketing

Exposure bracketing is where you take a sequence of photographs with different exposure levels and then blend them together to create a photograph with a much higher dynamic range. It gives you all the details you will ever need in your photographs so you can create the exact image you had in mind. Exposure bracketing is particularly useful in situations where the contrast between the brightest and darkest parts of the scene is too high for the camera’s sensor to capture in a single shot.  Common scenarios include landscape photography with bright skies and dark foregrounds. By capturing multiple exposures and blending them together or selecting the best shot, exposure bracketing helps you achieve optimal exposure and preserve details in both the highlights and shadows of the scene.

Trying the Technique