Expose for the highlights and process for the shadows. This is what the Zone system taught us ‘old’ film photographers, well it is still true in the digital age.
I have no problem sharing my exif info on my images, it offers a starting place for certain situations, but it doesn’t teach why those settings were chosen. This shot for instance, 1/250 sec @ f/2.8 with an iso of 1000. Yes you could set your camera to these setting and when you shot it you would expect a similar result…you would be disappointed. You would get a totally DIFFERENT result on your monitor than this because I shot for the highlights and processed for the shadows. So on your monitor with these settings this image would look very dark in the shadows, but Buzz’s face would look nice.
Why did I do this? Because in some tough lighting situations such as this, if I just got an ‘average’ overall exposure the face of Buzz would end up totally blown out. Yes, the rest of the image would look nice, but you would have zero detail in the face to be able to anything with it. So I chose to expose for the highlight area which is Buzz’s face so I could keep the details in that area knowing that I could easily open up the darker areas and make a nice image.
So understanding exposure and the basics of the zone system you can get a good starting exposure so you too can get wonderful images in tough lighting situations.
