Hi, it's Karen again from the photography playground. Welcome back. The question we're going to answer in this lecture is how to expose for the different light situations. Now I want you to know something about your eyes, they are an amazing couple, they can reach a large contrast, the camera can do that. The difference in contrast your eyes can handle is way bigger than the contrast your camera can handle. So in photography, we have to make choices.

In a high contrast light situation you need to decide what area you want to be properly exposed, the darker or the brighter areas. The contrast in this situation was too much for the camera to handle. It's not possible to have the foreground and the background properly exposed. You have to choose in a situation like this where you want you can expose for the bright area in the background and have an underexposed foreground or you can expose for the darker foreground and have an overexposed background. Not tell me which one do you prefer? My guess is it's the underexposed photo on the left.

So the general guideline for bridging a high contrast is to underexpose, you should expose for the brighter areas. Because the bright area will attract the attention, it will be the first thing your eyes traveled to. by exposing foot wide area that part of the image will be properly exposed and stand out even more. It adds a little drama in contrast, if the lighter areas are surrounded by deep dark areas, and if you expose for the dark area, the bright area will be overexposed and loses all detail, it will become white. Of course the same is true for the underexposed dark area, it will become black. But we are used to not seeing detail in a darker area.

And we're not used to not seeing detail in a bright area. There is one exception to this general guideline. When you photograph people you want their faces to be properly exposed. If you photograph a person against the bright sunny sky or a white wall, or any bright area, you don't want to expose for the bright area, because then the face will be underexposed, and the face Trump's a bright area. In those cases you want to overexpose for the face and fix the brighter area later in the post processing phase. In dealing with light, the first question you should be asking yourself is, is the light soft and diffused?

Or is it hard and direct? In a soft diffused light situation there usually is no problem. But when the light is direct and heart creating a large contrast, you have to be on guard and look carefully to determine some other aspects of the light. How is the light falling on my subject? Where is it coming from? Where is the brighter area in my frame?

Is that the area I want to attract the attention to? Let's get into the strategies for different light situations. But before we do that, you have to keep in mind that photography is not an accident. tyent I'll give you some general strategies for different situations. It's a starting point, but there will be situations for which the general guideline will not apply. My advice to you is to always take a few shots with different exposure settings.

This is a good way to practice and over time, you'll be able to recognize the situation more quickly and adjust your settings accordingly. In soft, diffused light and in open shadow, the light illuminates the scene evenly without deep dark shadows or bright highlight. The average the camera will calculate will do just fine in most cases. This is beautiful light photograph people from close by because of the softness of the light. front light is usually evenly spread out with shadows that fall behind the subject. The average will do a good job in most cases.

When you photograph people close by the light evenly illuminates the face. But watch out for squeezed eyes because people look directly into the sun applied creates the problem Shadows, but they're usually small due to the direction of the light. In general, an average of all the tones will work fine, especially when you photograph from above and the scene is white. When you come close, the shadows will start to play a bigger role in your composition and as a result in your exposure, then you will need to compensate for that. This is not the best light to photograph people from close by. Because the light from above will create shadows in places you don't want them, like the area of the eyes.

Satellite creates large shadows. If you let the camera do its thing it will calculate the average of the dark and bright tones and come up with an exposure that results in neither this nor that then it's time to take control. In most cases you will have to underexposed to make sure the bright area is properly exposed. In photographing people follow the same strategy, it can result in interesting shadows on the face. backlight is a tricky one. It creates such a high cost Contrast it's impossible for the camera to come even near reality.

You need to underexposed a lot usually shooting in this kind of light is very much a trial and error kind of thing. Take a few shots with different exposures to make sure the right one will be in there. shooting portraits in backlight is not recommendable, but it's great light to make silhouettes. You cannot manipulate the quality of the light. It's a sunny or cloudy day, not much you can do about that. But when it is a sunny day and you want to photograph in the soft light, you can search for the areas with open shadow.

However, to some extent it is possible to manipulate the direction of the light. front light side light and back light partly depends on your standpoint, and the position your subject takes in relation to the light. You can walk around and find the direction that suits your scene the best. These two photos were taken minutes apart. The position of the sun didn't change. What changed was my position towards the sun, creating a more interesting Photo by making use of the backlight.

In the next lecture, we're going to talk about what to do when there is a little light. See you there and until then happy photographing.