Danny Schweers Photography and Design

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Three Examples of Exposure

These examples are about exposure and histograms. If you are new to histograms, search for "histogram" on the Internet to learn about them. Histograms are a great way of telling what kind of exposure you get when shooting. Here's one link that explains histograms.

Here are three photographs:

1. with both ends of the histogram near zero.
2. with the right side of the histogram high.
3. with the left side of the histogram high.

Each of these examples shows a photo with its histogram underneath it. These histograms, from Adobe Lightroom, not only show the range of shadows, mid-tones, and highlights, but also show how the colors are distributed.

1 - Both ends of the histogram near zero. The histogram tells us that there are lots of red highlights, which is obvious looking at the photo, made of cooled lava at Volcanoes National Park in Hawaii.

2 - Right side of the histogram high. The under-side of these flowers are in shade. By over-exposing the shot, the flowers don't look shaded, they look bright, while the background has gone white, losing detail. By dropping detail from the background, the subject is emphasized.

3 - Left side of the histogram high. This exposure preserves the details in the brightly-lit leaf while the background goes black in many places. By dropping detail from the background, the subject is emphasized.

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