From the course: Photography Foundations: Exposure (part 2)

Develop an eye for exposure

From the course: Photography Foundations: Exposure (part 2)

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Develop an eye for exposure

- There are times when a photo is obvious. When the light's hitting the Eiffel Tower like this, it's not hard to recognize it as a scene that should be captured as a photo. This house alone on a hillside. This striking powerful trio in a darkened room. These shots are not hard to recognize and honestly they're not that hard to capture, but if you only shoot when you're at landmark locations or if you wait for obvious dramatic scenery or moments to occur, you're not going to take a lot of photos. These photo's are less obvious. They were not shot at landmark locations and each one is a scene that would be easy to walk by without noticing. So how did I recognize them as good photo fodder? Because of my understanding of exposure. When you develop an eye for light and shadow. When you learn to recognize interesting plays of contrast. When you come to understand that tones and colors can be interesting subject matter in their own right. When all of that happens, you'll recognize a wealth of new subject matter. Of course spotting a potential shot doesn't do you any good if you don't know how to capture it. In the first part of this series, you learned that exposure is the result of three parameters, shutter speed, ISO, and aperture. You saw that manipulation of those parameters lets' you control brightness and sharpness in your image, but exposure control let's you do more than that and we're going to explore how much more here in the second part of my two part exposure series on Linkedin learning. We don't learn about exposure simply to know how to control our cameras. We learn about exposure as a first step in learning to see photographically.

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