July 2021 • Nebraskaland 35
control that process. Whether you use your phone or a high-
end digital SLR camera, your camera's light meter is designed
to create images with a nice middle tone — not too bright,
not too dark. Much of the time, that's really helpful, whether
you're allowing the camera to set exposure for you or doing
it yourself. However, the "middle tone" attitude of your light
meter can create problems when you want to capture photos
with more dramatic lighting, or when the subject itself is
naturally brighter or darker than a middle tone (snow, white
fl owers, the face of a bison, etc.).
Most cameras allow for some kind of "spot metering," with
which you can select which part of a scene you want your
camera to gauge light intensity. When light intensity isn't
crazy high, spot metering means you can select the part of
the scene you want to be a middle tone and set your exposure
based on that. Or, you can select something that you want to
be brighter than middle tone (snow, for example) and adjust
your aperture/shutter speed settings to brighten the image
more than the camera's meter would recommend so the snow
looks white instead of gray.
When you have a situation with intense light and high
contrast, though, you can meter off the brighter areas and
adjust exposure settings so it is captured as a middle tone.
That will make the rest of the image dark, but you can "fi x
that in post." If you don't have time to mess with a spot
meter, or your camera doesn't give you that option, another
strategy is to make sure the sky makes up more than 50% of
the image. Most cameras, when allowed to make exposure
decisions by themselves, will try to make sure the majority
of an image is a middle tone, so if most of the image is bright
sky, the sky will look OK in your photo, but shadowed areas
below will look very dark. That's the best you can do in that
situation.
As mentioned earlier, the best way to avoid issues with
excessive light intensity is to avoid shooting when the
light is too bright. The clear blue-sky afternoons so often
rhapsodized about by many people are actually the worst-
case scenario for photographers. Early mornings, evenings,
Golden late-day light created beautiful warm colors in this scene, and the lower light intensity from a setting sun reduced the
contrast between highlights and shadows.
