Photographing Melbourne
Photographing Melbourne and beginning to decipher my exposure thinking. Be sure to read through to the end to get a lil window into how I interpreted the light.
There’s a good chance we’ve spoken about this before.
But it was my birthday on Tuesday and I spent a day wandering the Melbourne CBD seeking out light spilling through the cracks.
Photography is nothing more than documenting light. That is all.
As humans, we’re drawn to light. I swear, we’re just big, emotional moths. Right?
Think sunsets and rainbows. We go to great lengths just to look at light and as photographers, we do so at obsessive rates.
You with me now? See? We are but moths.
But light, good light, isn’t exclusively found in those beautiful, painterly sunsets.
It’s in the everyday scenes behind your local shops, in the basket of dog toys near the front window, or sliding effortlessly between skyscrapers to bring our attention to a businessman walking by.
It’s in the way the light reflects back onto the wall behind and creates textures seen for only a brief moment today.
And, if you’ve followed my advice, you’re there with a camera, not empty handed wishing you had more than a phone.
This road wasn’t on my route. The light drew me in. Had my camera not been in my hand, I probably wouldn’t have wandered through.
But, as I’m sure we’ve spoken about before, I was hunting those pockets of light that bark at me from alley ways, waiting to be noticed.
We’ve spoken about that before, yeah? Seeking pockets of light? Carrying your camera EVERYWHERE YOU GO?
So, you probably want more that the regurgitated rambling I regularly spit out?
Well, my good friend, you’re in luck!
Let’s dive into my thought process on how I get my pocket-of-light exposures.
Getting the exposure I want
Correct exposure is different for every person. But it’s also different for the story you’re trying to tell.
Many of my photographs lean into the darker side.
Opting for moody rather than ‘everything the light touches’ vibe.
On this photographing Melbourne outing, hunting the pockets of light creeping through the cracks, to show the bright spots, there must also be darkness.
Using the spot meter, I checked the exposure on a few parts of the scene, starting with the brightest parts. They’re called the highlights.
Then I did the same with the shadows.
Now I’ve a few different readings and I can assess where I want the image to sit.
In the image above, I wanted plenty of detail in the wall at the end of the laneway. That was a similar exposure to the pocket of light in the foreground.
The shadows are a few stops below that so, exposing for the highlight to be ‘correct’ would result in deep shadows.
Exactly what I was going for.
If you scroll back up to the first image, I wanted a little more detail in the shadows, and to see the texture on the back wall.
That meant the highlight, created by a break in the clouds, was going to be slightly over exposed.
Over-exposure on digital typically results in loss of detail, but in this instance, we retail most of it, and get a stack more in the shadows, too.
Much of what’s going through my head is a loose version of the Zone System. The 11 stops of light and how they play together. From middle grey to complete white, and of course the other way, to utter darkness.
In our 4 week beginner photography course, we dive far deeper into these thought processes. And more importantly, how you can use them to improve your photography.
We go through, in manageable detail, your metering modes, the Zone System, and why you might choose one exposure setting over the other.
If that’s something that sounds interesting, check out the full list of photography classes here.
