Adjust your photography to the light (and maybe your Christmas Tree).


Any photographer will tell you that light is the most important part of making a great image. I mean, without it, there's no way to make a photo. However, we always need to remember that a camera does not see light the same way we do. Often times, we must master the skills of getting our cameras to see the light the way we do, or at least get close to it. But sometimes we want the light to illuminate in ways that bring the most impact. 

Take your Christmas tree as a good example: We often behold the beauty of it in our house surrounded by subtle ambient light, but the tree shines brighter and creates a soft and exciting mood about it. The moment we try to capture it with our camera, we get either a dull shot with little tiny colored or white dots and flat ambient room light,  or we get brilliantly shining lights but a room so dark you can't see the beautiful room light given off by those lights. The problem here is that our eyes can see several shades of light and dark different than most cameras. The camera struggles to see what you see and thus gives you one result or another. This is due to what is called "Dynamic Range", which is the range of light from darkest darks to brightest whites. Our eyes see a very large range of lights and darks but the camera is limited with this. 

To accommodate, we must decide on how we want the camera to capture the light. This is a photographer decision. We are adjusting for the light. Do we want more ambient light or less? The decision is yours and your mission is to figure out how to control your camera to do make those decisions in either direction. 

So the next time you have your camera and are preparing to take that photo, make sure that you adjust for the light, lest you put yourself at the mercy of that sophisticated little box of electrical signals and artificial intelligence to decide how good your photos will be.

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