Understanding Exposure, 3rd Edition: How to Shoot Great Photographs with Any Camera
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video
Understanding Exposure, 3rd Edition: How to Shoot Great Photographs with Any Camera Details
About the Author BRYAN PETERSON is a professional photographer, internationally known instructor, and the bestselling author of Understanding Shutter Speed, Understanding Close-Up Photography, Bryan Peterson’s Understanding Photography Field Guide, Learning to See Creatively, Understanding Digital Photography, and Beyond Portraiture. In addition, he is the founder of the online photography school The Perfect Picture School of Photography (www.ppsop.com). He lives in Chicago. Read more
Reviews
First, my skill level: I am a photography enthusiast who has a fairly good grasp of photographic theory and methods, who has an eye for image composition, and who uses a DSLR to produce quality images, for someone of my experience. NOT a professional. NOT an expert. But passionate and always learning.Now, my review:I celebrate this book's powerful impact on my photography, an impact that occurred because I read the book as a 176 page persuasive argument in favor of manual exposure.On colorful, glossy, and attractively arrayed pages, Peterson argues for a distinction between an image's "correct exposure" and its "creatively correct exposure." The former, your camera's light meter will reliably report; the latter, you must derive based on the scene and your intentions for it. Camera light meters don't care about which items photographers want in focus or left intentionally over- or underexposed; they care only about the degree to which the areas of frames assigned to their attention meet the accepted standard 18% grey specification. When that standard produces an image to your liking, great! But many times, your intended image is not possible if the meter's guidance is accepted. Hence, the need for manual exposure.This book is a concise, yet thorough and eminently readable discussion of factors that affect an image's exposure: aperture (how wide open is the hole that lets light in through the lens to reach the camera's sensor), shutter speed (how long is that hole open), and light (that which allows the camera and its photographer to "see" anything). Interestingly, Peterson does not spend nearly as much time on ISO (the sensitivity of the camera's sensor to light) as he does on aperture and shutter speed, but his choice does not damage the book's final excellence.Appearing, on average, about once per page are wonderful images from his professional work that showcase whatever subject matter is currently under review. More importantly, each of those images is accompanied by a marvelously detailed report as to the reason for his presence at the scene reflected, as well as his thought process that yielded the settings and methods choices he made before pushing the shutter button. I am a big fan of such process captions, and Peterson writes them VERY well.Earlier I said this book functioned for me as a persuasive argument for shooting in manual exposure. Because of this book, I made the choice to shoot manual from now on, except when conditions require aperture- or shutter priority. Before reading "Understanding Exposure," I would have snickered at the suggestion that I would shoot in manual. But Peterson's work convinced me that if you understand the interplay of aperture, shutter, ISO, and light well enough - and I think I do - then manual mode is the mode that offers the best chance of producing the image of your vision. As important, the book convinced me that manual mode is not nearly as challenging or cumbersome to employ as I once thought it was. Now that I have been shooting in manual for a couple of weeks, I tell you the book is right.I heartily, unconditionally recommend "Understanding Exposure, 3rd Edition."
