Measuring Light for Photography

Video Transcript

"Now we're going to talk about measuring the light. Measuring the light is very important when you're taking your photograph, especially when you're using a manually controlled camera. It's just important to know what you're dealing with in the light and how the light relates to your appature and shutter speeds. Most modern cameras have a built in light meter. In mine, you can find it by looking through the viewfinder and there's a light meter across the bottom. The light meter is indicated with a horizontal line and it generally has a center point, either marked with a dash or a colored image. Every camera is different, so I encourage you to get your camera, check it out, find out where your light meter is and how it works. The light meter is used to help you determine the right balance of shutter speed and appature. So you'll notice, there's your center point, and with whatever setting you have, you'll be either to the left or to the right of this center point, and you can adjust the shutter speed to bring you closer to the center, or adjust the appature to bring you closer to the center. It's important to take photographs in different settings and see how the different light meter results will determine what the photograph looks like. Now, a light meter can be very helpful, but it's important to remember that the human eye can handle a lot more light variances than a camera can. So you kind of have to think for your camera in certain instances, especially if you're composing something where maybe your subject is to the left or to the right of a brighter image. You can see in this photograph that I wanted to take a picture of this horse in this stable. Now if I had solely trusted my light meter, which is set up to the center of the camera, it's going to measure the light based upon all that light that's coming in the background. But I wanted the image to be of the horse so I actually shifted my camera over to be looking just at the horse, did all my settings according to my light meter with it focused on the horse, and then brought the image back to a full view and captured the image as so. Again, the point I'm trying to illustrate here is that you can't always trust your light meter and you need to use your own judgement at times. Another example of this is if you're shooting an object that is backlit, maybe with a sunset of something of that nature, you'll see in this photograph, this is a picture of the capitol building. Now if I had used my light meter just on the sky in the background, we would have gotten a good image on the sky, but absolutely no details on the capitol building. And vice versa, if we would have just metered the capitol building, you have had some detail in there, but the sky would have been blown out. So again, this photograph illustrates that you need to use your own mind and your own thoughts as well as the light meter to get the perfect settings for your photograph."