Pathways #2a: Michael Frye - Reading Histograms (and using them!)

In my Pathways #2 article on this blog, I spoke about getting better exposures straight out of your camera.  It makes such a huge impact on the visual appeal of a photo to have it properly exposed.  Within that article, I posted an example photo of mine to drive home my point.  This post is related to the one I mentioned above, so I called it "2a".  :-)

The two main tools to achieve better exposure are:  1) having the knowledge of how your camera's metering system works and what lighting situations will fool your camera into over or underexposing a scene, and 2) how to use your camera to correct these situations.  I touched on both points in my article. 

Related to #2 above, the main way to use your camera to understand and correct any given exposure situation is by viewing the histogram and understand what it's telling you about the exposure settings that you've chosen for any given photo that you're trying to take.

To that end, today I read this post by Michael Frye on his blog that drives home the point of getting proper exposure with even better examples than I provided in my article because he includes photos and histograms and explains what they're showing you.

It's a quick and useful read for anyone looking to get better exposures straight out of their camera.  Enjoy!