How Do You Expose for the Whites?

Thank you for viewing. Ever since I started getting into Wildlife Photography, mostly Avian, I have seen one common mistake that a lot of the photographers make. That is to overexposed whites on the subject. Therefore, I am sharing what I have learned and what has worked for me.

So how do you avoid that?

Often times, a lot of photographers love using TV or AV mode when shooting either a white bird or snowy landscape scene. When you do that, the camera metering system will read the whites and automatically compensate for it by either increasing the shutter speed or f stop, possibly causing the end results to be darker than it is. To make this work, you will have to compensate the exposure.

Histogram, the thing that shows up on your LCD screen on your camera, will tell you your shadows and highlights. I often tell people, the histogram is your best friend. I always shoot in manual mode, no exception to the white subject. I will often would take a few shots with a different exposure settings, checking the histogram to make sure that the right side of the curve does not end up too far to the right.



My motto: "Push to the right" and it really works. I would adjust the exposure until the curve started to get very close to the right side of the histogram. Please refer to the histogram above.

Remember, I recommend you to shoot in RAW format, if your shot is just a bit over exposed on the whites, you will have a better chance on recovering the details that the Post Processing with the recovery slider or simple burning technique.

I hope by sharing this will help some fellow PM members.

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credit http://www.troylimphotography.com