"Knowing how your digital camera meters light is critical for achieving consistent and accurate exposures. Metering is the brains behind how your camera determines the shutter speed and aperture, based on lighting c ...

Metering systems are calibrated to a certain light value in order to gurantee constant exposure settings: 18% gray is commonly accepted because a typical scene seems reflect the same amount of light as this gray value. As a framework for c ...

"The camera metering system reacts to the amount of light reflected from the scene in the viewfinder and computes the camera settings needed to make a nominally correct exposure. What is adjusted depends on the mode the camera is in:" "M ...

"The thing that should strike you from this exercise is just how different a three-dimensional form can look when lit from different angles. 1. Light has depth of field. 2. With enough light, you can turn a white wall black. " cont ...

Shooting in full manual mode will always be the best way to get the most creative shot since you are in control of everything. But there are instances when you just do not have the time to fiddle around with the proper combination of ISO, ape ...

Consider if the subject in the foreground was holding a piece of the white background seamless paper next to their face with only the key and fill lights on. When the exposure for the face was correct the paper would be reproduced as white wo ...

We’ve mentioned in previous posts how in-camera metering can be very unreliable. It can meter the scene differently even if the subject and lighting do not change. In the series of photos below, I left the camera at evaluative mode and took t ...

Point your camera at a subject, check the meter, and press the shutter release button. The camera clicks. Later, you review your shots on the camera's LCD display and take a look at the histogram. Both the meter and histogram show you version ...

Metering with your digital camera: Incident v.s. Reflected. Covers metering tricks with these two techniques and shows how to improve exposure in your images.

"Light ratios are confusing because there is more than one way to describe the difference in intensity between lights and because incident readings used to infer reflected highlight-to-shadow ratios. So first let's start by defining terms:" ...

"For a correct exposure you want all the channels in all parts of the photo to be below the point they max out and loose detail. As a starting point you need to set the color balance of the camera to match the color of the light so when a bri ...

The Pentax K200D has a 2.7-inch LCD display with 230,000 pixels and a 160-degree horizontal/vertical viewing angle. The viewfinder is a lightweight pentamirror TTL optical design with 96% field of view, 0.85x magnification, diopter adjustment ...

" The good: Excellent photo quality for its class; better-than-average speed. The bad: Maximum ISO 1600; huge spot-for-spot metering. The bottom line: It doesn't stand out for its feature set or design, but the Canon EOS Rebel XSi delivers on ...

Why start with just one light? Because you can get amazing portraits, that’s why. Did I mention less equipment, less complication, less cost, and less time? Oh, and once you’ve mastered portraits with a single light, using more lights is pure ...

"The Gray Card is a process control benchmark for color management. Without one our camera, monitor and printer are only as good as our eye's ability to discern color, and our eyes are easily fooled. Absent any external reference our eyes wil ...