Exposure isn't everything

- Recently I was poking around in a photography forum and I was reading a thread that was a discussion of the composition of a particular image. It was a good discussion, and then someone chimed in with what were your exposure settings? I hear this in workshops and classrooms from time to time and I have to say I always wonder, why are you asking that question? Don't get me wrong, if you're a beginning photographer, there's a lot you can learn if you know the exposure settings that were used for a given image. If you're still not comfortable with whether a big aperture makes a deeper, deep or shallow depth of field, or if you're still not comfortable what size number corresponds to big or small aperture, then yeah, careful analysis and thought about the exposure settings that you're seeing with a given image, that can help you learn.

What I worry about, if you're a photographer who's already comfortable with your exposure theory, is that you are looking at those exposure settings 'cause you're looking for a recipe. I worry that what you're thinking is, oh, I see a lot of images that I like that were shot with F8, so I'll set my camera on F8. That's not how good photography works. What could you possibly learn by looking at the exposure settings for a particular image? You might say, well, I want to know how they got the shadow depth of field that they got. Well, you should know that.

They used a wide aperture. Does it really matter if it was at 2.4 or F1.8? You might say, well, yeah, it does matter because I'm thinking maybe I should spend the extra money for a 1.8 lens. Okay, there's some validity there. But you gotta remember that depth of field is not only a function of aperture size. It's also a function of the sensor size of your camera. Well, maybe they're telling you that also, until you can go look up the sensor size in their camera and understand if there might be some correspondence to the depth of field that you would get on your camera with its particular sensor size. But, depth of field is also a function of the size of the objects in the background of the image, and that's a function of camera position, and you can't tell that from exposure settings.

So maybe with some thought and analysis you could get some idea of the quality of a particular defocusing on a particular lens at a particular aperture, if you know the exposure setting. You know, a better way to find that out is to go to the camera store and try out the lens. Or rent a lens online and try it out that way. I just don't know that you're really gonna learn that much from looking at those exposure settings. One of the greatest creative things we can do as photographers is choose to intentionally over or under expose things, to plunge shadows into darkness, or to brighten up highlights.

When I look at exposure settings, I don't actually know if there was intentional over or under exposure there because I don't know what the original metering was. Now, maybe in some situations I could figure that out. Maybe it's a scene shot in bright daylight, and I see that it was at ISO100, and I know from the sunny 16 rule, that at ISO100, F16, at 1/100th of a second is a good baseline exposure. I could then work through the reciprocal calculations from there to figure out from this setting that they have told me, whether they over or under exposed, maybe. That assumes that I'm right about my initial ideas of their baseline metering, and that also assumes that they're not doing any dodging and burning.

It may be that the under exposure I'm seeing is because of stuff they've done in post production. So, I don't really learn anything from that either. I could, if I'm a sport shooter, and I'm seeing a race car going by, and they've frozen the motion, I could look at shutter speed to get an idea of what kind of shutter speed do you need to freeze a particular motion, or to maybe get a particular blur of a particular kind. Sure, I could learn some things from that. All this only happens if I'm being very, very thoughtful about translating what I'm seeing in those settings, into what I'm seeing in the image.

Sometimes, I can make that translation, sometimes I can't. So, again, don't look at these settings with the idea that you're gonna learn some recipe that's gonna make you a better photographer. You have a very specific question that you think, after much thought, can be answered by looking at those settings that's great. If you're a beginning photographer who's still trying to wrap your mind around the basic specific exposure theory, then yes, looking at those can be very helpful. But really what makes you a better photographer is practice, thoughtful practice. And working your shot, experimenting, trying different things, constantly trying to look for a new image, and shooting a lot.

As you're doing that, your exposure settings are gonna be what you think are right at that given time. Those settings aren't necessarily gonna apply anywhere else. So keep your eye on the ball, practice a lot, that's what's gonna make you a better shooter.