(kinda) Weekly Photo Tip – Overexposed is a good thing!
March 19th, 2010It is OK to be overexposed! When I am trying to make a good photo in a scene that isn’t always the best looking, I try to never accept the light I see as the best it can be. I overexpose my images to clean-up the backgrounds and to bring out the vibrancy of the colors that you can’t see, but are always there. You may hear a photographer say that cloudy and overcast days are the best for taking photos, this is because some of the most vibrant colors are in the shadows (and no harsh light on a subject’s face, but for this post, it is because of the colors).
Here are a few examples:
Now go and overexpose!
Great tip! I’ve always been a fan of shooting landscapes and overexposing always killed great cloud textures so I’ve been in the mindset that darker is better. Example 2 really shows when overexposing can change a photo. I need to try this!
you’re a beast with your 1/3 sec. exposures.
Hey Casey, if you’re searching for a tip idea one week, one thing I’ve always wondered is for those trained in the photo industry, how do you go about editing a photo. I’m an editing junkie, and with an awesome new tool like Aperture, I have so much at my fingertips. But without much formal training, I’ve pretty much been self taught and learned through exploring what each adjustment does to affect an image. Is there a certain way to go about the editing process, like should you always start with a certain adjustment and proceed list-like after that or is there no rhyme or reason to editing? And once in a particular adjustment, is it a measure by eye process or with your experience can you tell you need to move this that much? It’s a loaded question that you could probably teach classes on I know, but anything you could offer would be great!
[...] looked blown out and I dialed the exposure back a little — I’d been thinking of this when I was doing it — and kept on shooting. It wasn’t until I uploaded the images to my [...]
i’m late on this, but i absolutely agree.