Shoot into the light? – How?

Relying on your light meter…

…Continuing on from this Previous Post

One of the main difficulties you will encounter when shooting into the light is that your light meter will almost certainly produce a dud result.  Your camera’s light meter assumes a subject of mid tone grey, so to balance the tones with the intense bright light coming straight into the lens it will show your subjects as black silhouettes, usually with no detail information in the shadows.

Your image will usually turn out very dark…

Getting the exposure right

You can avoid this by shooting in manual – M Mode, doing a couple of test shots excluding the direct light til you get it right. Or, you can dial up exposure compensation in the semi automatic modes of Aperture Priority (Av or A), Shutter Priority (Tv or S) or even Program (P).

Exposure Compensation dial

Exposure compensation is telling the camera you want more or less exposure than the light meter’s default. When you add exposure (+1, +2, or +3 stops, usually measured in ⅓ or ½ stop increments), you brighten the overall exposure of the image, When you subtract exposure (-1, -2, or -3), you will darken the overall exposure of the image.

why not just shoot in M Mode?

Unlike M mode – where the camera just accepts the settings you select for aperture & Shutter speed – in A, T or P mode you are still relying on the inbuilt light meter to set the exposure, with more or less exposure than the default setting.

So if the light changes the camera is still automatically setting the exposure for each shot, but with the variation you have dialled in.

Whereas in M Mode, you need to be adjusting the exposure yourself, which is fine for thoughtful landscapes, but not great for action shots.

Preserving Shadow detail

When shooting into the light shooting, or with back lit subjects, you will usually be adding exposure to try to preserve some shadow detail in your subject; completely black silhouettes are rarely effective, they tend to look flat (see image below).

How far you dial up exposure compensation depends on the intensity of the light you’re shooting into and the depth of the shadows you are trying to preserve.

The sure fire way to get it right

This all sounds a bit vague, a bit hit & miss… besides trial and error, how do you know when you have it right?

One of the best things about the advent of digital photography (I come from the old days of film) is the Histogram, it tells you everything you need to know about your exposure at a glance, and once you know how to read it, a glance is all you will need.

The histogram is one of the best things about digital, and if you dont understand how it works your photography has a massive self imposed handicap! I’ll talk about this in the next post…