Histogram part one.

OK, you have the camera you can afford and you enjoy playing with. Good quality glass on the front of the said camera. So are you let the camera make all the decisions for you sort of photographer or a control freak like me and tell the camera what to do and when it does not do as it is told, you take the battery out as a punishment. Unless you shoot Manual, the camera is making decisions for you. I grew up in the film era and had cameras that only had manual, so I have stuck to using manual in the digital era. It is often hard to do and can be very challenging, however like anything, the more you practice the better and quicker you get. You make decisions without consciously thinking about them, the subconscious does all decision making, so it happens very quickly. This will only work if you understand the parameters of your camera, what you can do with the files captured.

 One aspect of digital photography that is awesome, is the histogram, this indicates the levels of light and dark captured in the image, remember it reads the JPEG compressed image. However if you know your camera as well as you know yourself, you will understand how far to push the histogram to get the information in the file to achieve the result you want.

When I review the back of my camera, I use the little image as a check of my composition only and check my exposure by looking at the histogram, I never look at the image for exposure. I know i have 14 stops of dynamic range in my camera, so I know how to read my histogram, to know how much recoverable information I have if I need to compromise, do you? More about the histogram to follow.
If you want to learn more about photography, your camera and being more creative, join me on one of my workshops.
https://www.scottfowlerworkshops.com/