This is a good example of the exposure we talked about in podcast #6. In the first image, I took a shot of the scene using only the camera’s meter and no adjustments. As we discussed in the podcast the job of all camera meters is to average out the scene. Since so much light was coming in via the window, the camera ‘said’ hey I need to reduce exposure. Therefore the cat has almost no detail, but the curtains look great.
In shot two I based my exposure on the grey card by approaching it, filling the camera frame with it, plugging the reading into the camera and taking the shot with that reading. Notice how the curtains have almost no detail now. This is a much better exposure if the goal of the shot‚in to show a cat in the light by the window. The exposure should have also been very similar had we used an incident meter reading based on the cat.
As a final note both these shots illustrate another point from the podcast which is that if the contrast (the difference between the brightest and darkest elements) of the scene is too great, the camera will NOT be able to record both ends properly.
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