Artistic vs. "Wrong" | Part 1: Exposure
Continuing on with the theme from yesterday, people apparently want to know where the line in the sand is between "good" and "bad" photography. After all, photography is art, isn't it? And art is subjective. Hah! Therefor all photography is good in its own way!
Look, there will always be elements to photography that are artistic, but as a long-time friend of mine recently said in relation to the topic at hand: if you want to market your photography as art, sell it in an art gallery. If you are hired to photograph someone's wedding, birthday, anniversary, baby, graduation portrait, and so on, you've been commissioned to help these people capture reality in the most beautiful and memorable way possible. It's not your job to be an artist in the traditional sense of the word, but rather it is your job to be a photo-journalist -- someone who captures those emotion-provoking photos of important events in a person's life.
That all being said, there will always be artistic techniques involved at all levels of photography. So what is the difference between good artistic or stylized photography, and bad photography?
Low Key Photography vs. Under Exposure
Low Key photography is a lot of fun and can look amazing. This style of photography involves the a balancing act between illumination and elimination, normally using lighting techniques.
These are low-key portraits created with a rim-lighting scenario (first photo) and a short-lighting scenario (second photo). While there are very few details of the person's face available, and in the case of the first photo the majority of the person is completely in darkness/shadow, this is still an amazing picture. Low Key photography is an artistic photographic expression that brings with it intense drama and beauty.
Now let's take a look at some examples of poor lighting and exposure that are not artistic in nature.
The above portrait is extremely under-exposed. To an untrained eye, it is possible to mistake this as a usable finished product, but there is no way a photo like this should ever make it to your client. Luckily, if you pop this photo into Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw (or work with an exposure layer in Photoshop), you should be able to boost the exposure enough to make it usable. You will have to do several post-production adjustments after that, however, to deal with the resulting grain and degradation of the photo's quality. Bringing back shadows from under-exposure creates noise, typically a lot of noise, and will also bring back a lot of exposure across the photo equally. So if you wanted the dark background, you'll be working with a lot of layer masks in Photoshop to create the look you want while still having a properly-exposed portrait.
This portrait isn't meant to be moody and artistic, and there are a number of ways you can discover this just by looking at it. The pose of the subject, the expression on his face.. this was meant to be a portrait, not an art school project. The portrait should have been properly exposed, and as a result this photo is bad.
The solution here is just to get it right in-camera. Learn to read your histogram, invest in a light meter, understand the inverse-square law so that you know how the distance of your lights will affect your subject, and if all else fails, take several photos at several different exposures so you have a choice in post production.
Let's see some more examples of what not to do:
This photo is also under-exposed. Most likely what has happened is that the camera was left in "auto" mode and exposed more for the sky instead of the subject. This is extremely common in amateur photographers who have not yet learned how to work with foreground and background exposure values and who have not yet learned how to operate their camera in manual mode.
As with the last photo, you should be able to recover a good bit of exposure in Lightroom or a similar tool, but again these are adjustments you shouldn't have to be making. The in-camera solution here (assuming you absolutely want to shoot into the bright sky and you want that in the photo) is to lock the exposure to the background and then add a bit of fill flash to the foreground. You don't need a crazy expensive rig to get a little fill-flash these days, but please don't use the pop-up flash on your camera unless you've modified it with a diffuser of some sort (could be as simple as a piece of wax paper).
High Key Photography vs. Over Exposure
As you can imagine, high key photography is essentially just the opposite of low-key photography on the contrast scale. You're still working with a balance between illumination and elimination, but you are doing it with light instead of shadows.
Let's take a look at some good high-key photography:
There are a lot of elements of these photos that make them good artistic photography, even though you're dealing with entirely blown-out highlights. One thing you want to focus on is the eyes and the visible details that do exist in the photo. They are sharp, crisp, and they attract the eye in a positive way. They draw you in with intense visual interest. If either of these photos had been too soft/out of focus, they would not have made my "good photography" list. When you use an artistic style of some kind, you have to use good technique to achieve it, and not just consider every error in the book to be an addition to that style. There is a right and a wrong way to produce styles.
Let's see what over-exposure looks like in comparison:
Now I chose this photo for a reason, and that reason is that I've talked about this photo before. As a result, I'm not going to get into too much detail about why the photo is bad. I will say a few things I may not have touched on in the original post though:
I said one of the things that makes those high-key portraits so good is in the details remaining even after the highlights blow out. And that same thing is true of the above photo, except in reverse: the details remaining after the highlights blow out in this father-daughter photo make it wrong: the eyes are dark and hollowed-out, the head is completely missing, the skin-tones look frozen-corpse-like, and a lot of the photo just isn't in that great of a focus to begin with.
However, I will say something positive about the photo: The composition is really quite good. This photo could have been beautiful, but due to some poor photography that I believe was "covered up" (read: not covered up at all) with some equally-poor post processing, this photo is not fit for client-consumption.
The solution here.. well, there is no solution. Fact is, you probably won't be able to recover enough of the blown details in Lightroom or Camera Raw to allow this photo to become usable. Blown highlights are typically worse than under-exposed shadows for recovery. My recommendation would have been to offer to reshoot for free, plain and simple, or to simply not give the client this photo and hopefully some of the other photos you took were of far better caliber.
How to prevent the problem: Always expose for your background and use a bit of fill-flash for the subject, and try to lay off the Clarity and Exposure sliders in post-production. If I had to guess, this person used some sort of a filter to make the problem even worse, because human skin does not come out of the camera looking like that, even in the worst exposure scenarios.
If you don't want to get into flash photography, just don't shoot into bright skies! It confuses the shit out of your camera, and it makes bald men cry. Put your client in a shaded area, know what times of the day are best for you to shoot, get a reflector or a diffuser which are cheap and plentiful around the interwebs, and remember no matter what the sky looks like? You'll be able to adjust your white balance in post to make it look as sunny or cloudy as you want it to be. So don't be afraid to put your subject in some shade, rather than trying to capture that crazy sun blinding everyone in the background.
Exposure: What the heck am I doing wrong?
When you take a photo with your camera, it puts all the colors into an itty bitty blender and mixes them until they come out to "middle grey" or what we call 50% grey. This grey is what the camera considers to be proper exposure.
If the photo has more light in it than dark (for example, if the sky is extremely bright and takes up a good chunk of the photo), the process by which the camera comes to an exposure setting automatically will be fooled. All of these bright tones cause the camera to bring the exposure DOWN over-all to create the middle-grey value it really really wants. This results in a properly-exposed sky or bright spot, and an under-exposed subject.
This is incredibly important for wedding photographers, and here's why:
Wedding dresses and black tuxes mess with your camera, and your mind.
If you tell your camera to properly-expose for the tux, you risk blowing out the dress. Expose for the dress, you risk under-exposing the tux. The solution?
Learn to run your camera in manual mode, and don't trust your camera's internal light meter. If you don't have a hand-held light meter (and I always suggest that you should have one just in case), take a photo and check the histogram. If the histogram is telling you the photo is over exposed, but your camera's meter is telling you it's just right, you trust the histogram not the meter in every case.
[On a side note: The above wedding photo? Is also bad photography for more reasons than just the exposure problem... bad light, nasty shadows, squinting eyes, disinterested groom, the list goes on... that, however, is for another time.]
Exposure isn't hard to understand, but it is something you have to sit down and learn about (try a few lectures on the subject, I've sat through at least five dozen of them and I always seem to learn something new), and then pick up a camera and experiment. You then have to be willing to admit to yourself: Is my photo good? And if not... how can I fix it both in post-processing now and in-camera for next time.
Denial is a photographer's worst enemy. Don't count on your friends, family, or sometimes even clients to give you the best feedback on your work. Consult with other experienced photographers for legitimate critiques of your work.
See you next time in Part 2.
