Digital Camera Master

The reason photographic lighting is such a challenge is that you have two different systems operating at once: your eyes and your camera. Your pupils are super-advanced apertures that constantly adjust to ambient light. Even in extreme conditions, such as when you go from a completely dark theater to the bright lobby, it takes only seconds for your optical system to adjust.

Furthermore, you can look at a scene that contains both deep shadows and super-bright highlights and see detail in both areas simultaneously. Your eyes, optical nerves, and brain adjust constantly to interpret the ever-changing landscape around you. Unfortunately, your camera can’t do the same.

While your eyes can pick up the entire tonal range of a scene (the shades from brightest white to darkest black), a camera can pick up detail in only a slice of it. For example, if you’re shooting a bright sky filled with clouds and trees casting deep shadows on meadow grass, you have a decision to make.

Which parts of this scene are most important to you, the bright sky, the trees, or the deep shadows? On a good day, your camera records detail in only two of the three elements.

With practice, you can learn to see the world the way your camera does, to the great benefit of your photos. For example, try setting up a natural-light scene, such as a still life with fruit. Put the camera on a tripod. Study the scene with your eyes, and then photograph it. Compare what the lens records with the image in your head.

Are they the same? Probably not. How are the two images different? Make a few notes about your perceptions as compared to what the camera captured, and then repeat the exercise with a different scene. When the image in your head begins to match the one on the camera’s LCD screen, then you’ve truly begun to see the world with a photographic eye.