From the course: Creating a Short Film: 07 Cinematography

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Exposing for the subject

Exposing for the subject

From the course: Creating a Short Film: 07 Cinematography

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Exposing for the subject

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- When setting the exposure on your camera, it's important to understand what you're trying to expose for. Most shots will have multiple objects that will be reflecting or emitting varying amounts of light. In most cases you won't be able to get the proper exposure for everything, so you'll need to decide which objects to adjust your exposure for. Let's look at an example. In this shot of the warrior Gar'uun, we pointed the camera at a blank sky. Now granted it was overcast, but even an overcast sky is much, much brighter than this dude is. Especially when there's no direct light source on the front of him. So we could flood him with light to balance out that disparity in brightness, but we didn't want to do that in this case because it would have felt unnatural. As we'll learn later, that's just kind of a weird angle for lighting and there's nothing really motivating the light from this direction. I think what most cinematographers would do in this case is set their exposure so that…

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