My friend Jill at Forever’n Ever’n Always Photography posted a wonderful tutorial on correct exposure yesterday. She is in the process of re-reading Bryan Peterson’s book Understanding Exposure and sharing her lessons learned along the way. She suggests that if you’re going to take photography serious in 2011, that you purchase your own copy…I did just that!
Anyways, I felt inspired by her post last night. Although I like to think of myself as more of a creative photographer, proper exposure is really important regardless of the type of photography you shoot. Unfortunately, these days, by the time I hit the gym, get home and take a shower, my natural light is gone! However, my new Canon 7D has ISO capacity all the way up to 6400 so I don’t have to bring out my speedlight in order to get a shot. This came in handy last night because Kitty Paw was laying in between my legs. There was no way I was going to be able to get up to get my external flash…and then recreate that sweet moment.
ISO 6400, f/2.8 (had I been able to get up, my 50 mm f/1.8 would have been nice), 1/50
My SOOC shot is a little underexposed but going much below a shutter speed of 1/50 without my tripod might have produced a shaky image. I do love that I was able to capture some nice catchlights…I’m thinking they’re coming from the kitchen behind me.
I opened the photo in Adobe Camera Raw and made just a couple of exposure adjustments (I stayed away from auto this time because it wanted to dramatically change the picture…and create a lot of noise). I then opened the shot in Adobe CS5. I made a slight curves adjustment, levels adjustment and brightness/contrast adjustment. I really could have stopped there because it was a nice improvement but I decided to play with a couple of actions for a little extra something. I then applied Totally Rad Flare Up: Golden (lowered the opacity a bit) and Totally Rad Lux: Hard from the Revenge 2 collection. Of course I also had to do a little blurring in the background to reduce the noise.
With all that said, stay tuned for a big announcement on Sunday (it’ll be posted on my both my blog as well as Jill’s). We are looking forward to exploring core photography and editing skills in more depth and hope you’ll join us! In the meantime, check out more touch-ups as well as a new challenge hosted by Sarah at NapTime MomTog, Whitney from Q & Us and Marah from Diary of a Devil Dog Wife called Momtographer Monday.
Happy Tuesday!
