This week I tackled an assignment from “The Visual Toolbox” as part of my P52. Admittedly, this week is a little less “pretty” and a little more “nerdy”.
We hosted family from out of town this past weekend so I had to sort of tackle the assignment last minute (so the images are a little uninspired) and the assignment is a wee bit on the technical side.
The idea was to push the camera’s histogram as far to the right as possible (toward overexposure) without actually loosing detail in the highlights, then bringing it back successfully in post processing. (For those of you that want to know some of the technicalities, here is a brief explanation. Your camera, as a digital device, records images as data, then translates it and displays it as the image you see on your LCD screen or monitor. The sensor in your camera is able to read and record more data in the highlights of an image than in the shadows. So you have a better chance or bringing back an image that is overexposed and completely washed out, than one that is underexposed and super dark.)
Yup. That’s right. Intentionally shooting an “incorrect exposure” in the can. I will fully admit this was hard for me to wrap my mind around. As a photographer, you spend so much time trying to achieve consistently perfect exposures in the camera. Going against the grain is a little challenging.
You might be wondering why you would intentionally create a bad image only to have to fix it later? For the same reason you might floor the accelerator of your car on an empty country road. You never know what your tools are capable of until you push them to the limits.
A couple of images I have here do still have a few blown highlights from windows, that was a choice I made. Frankly, I am pretty sure I could push the histogram a little bit further, especially when shooting scenes with less contrast.
Straight out of camera is on the left, edited is on the right. Only exposure and small color correction adjustments were done in the edited versions.
