Excerpts from the article.
Lessons learnt from a private lesson from Tom Bear
So what do you do if there’s too much shadow on one side of the face? A real photographer would hold up a reflector on that side—if there’s an assistant and fancy equipment handy. But in a pinch, Tom uses snow, a sheet from the hotel room, a piece of paper, somebody wearing a white shirt, or even—on our photo-safari lesson—a MacBook laptop, whose silver aluminum body makes a perfect diffuse reflector. “That’s why photographers use Macs,” he joked.* Like any good shutterbug, Tom thinks a lot about light. When he’s taking portraits, the subjects are frequently baffled to see him staring at his own fist in front of his face. What he’s doing is gauging the “wrap”—the degree of light falloff from the brightest side to the darkest side. Some degree of wrap is desirable in a portrait (photographically speaking, about 1.5 stops’ worth); you don’t want to shoot in direct sunlight, where you get squinty eyes and deep black unflattering shadows. On the other hand, you don’t want the face to look completely flat, either.
* Tom says that prints don’t show as much noise and pixels as you see on the computer screen. You might be dissatisfied with the way a photo looks on your computer screen, considering it too “noisy” (has too many color speckles)—but you’ll be surprised at how well it prints. You don’t see that much noise, partly because the ink smooths them out, and partly because people don’t look at prints with their noses pressed right up against them.
* Tom almost always shoots slightly overexposed. You can always tone down the brights in Photoshop later. But if the shot was underexposed, it’s much harder to recover the details that are lost in shadow. “And always overexpose women,” he said. “Overexposing kills wrinkles.”
(Note: Several readers left comments that David Pogue got this overexpose advice backwards. But, all agreed with "overexposing kills wrinkles")
* Tom suggests being careful to avoid “chimping,” a term I’d never heard before. That’s where you get so excited about looking at the playback of your photos on the camera’s screen that you miss the great shots still available around you. (Why is that “chimping?” Because you’re standing there, looking at your playback like an idiot, going, “Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!”)
A link from a readers' comments: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/expose-right.shtml
No comments:
Post a Comment