Ep. 41 How to Shoot With Strong Back Lighting

 Hi, my name is Kevin Ahronson from Hampshire School of Photography, and welcome to Tog Talk. 4, 3, 2, 1, 0,  all engines running.  Liftoff! We have a liftoff! 

If you've never listened to Tog Talk before,  tog is a shortened slang for photographer. So Tog Talk means photographers in conversation. Makes a lot of sense. This is the solo show. Once a fortnight,  I do a solo show answering listeners questions. And then on the weeks in between, I'm co hosting with the very lovely Kelly Perrin who runs a local photographic studio for amateurs here in Fleet in North Hampshire. And once a fortnight we get together and we dig deep into different photographic subjects. So, , Before we go any further, if you would just like to click on the like button and subscribe.

The more likes and subscribes we get, the more chances there are of this podcast being spotted by other photographers. It kind of rises up the ranks, if you like, every time someone likes and subscribes. So please do that, we'd really appreciate it. And of course, if you subscribe, then you get an indication or notification every time we upload a new video.

Every time we publish a new episode, we're trying to do it once a week. Don't always get there. I've been away on holiday, so there's been a gap of a week or two, but we're back again today or I'm back again today with a vengeance.

So I've been a photographer for over 50 years. I think it's about 55, 56 years at last count long time.

And I've been teaching photography. Uh, initially started in 2009, and then I founded the Hampshire School of Photography in 2016. So now I spend most of my time sharing my decades of knowledge with the next generation of photographers. Okay, so I've got a question that's coming in from Alistair. Let's listen to what his problem is.

Hi Kevin.  I was trying to photograph my seven year old daughter in front of our French windows on the weekend, but I just couldn't get the exposure right. She kept coming out very dark, almost a silhouette.  I'm afraid I am quite new to photography, so I'm still struggling with camera settings.  Any ideas what I might be doing wrong? 

So this is a big question, isn't it? And it's probably one of the most common scenarios that all of us have come across at some time or another. You've taken a picture of the kids, or the wife, or the husband, or the partner, or the mate, or the whatever, and they're standing against something which is really bright, like a window, or maybe the entrance to a shop, or a multi storey car  park or a cave? It could be anything, anything where the background's really bright and if they're standing in the dark inside the shadowed area where the, you know, the light isn't hitting and they've got a really bright area behind them or maybe they're just standing in front of some lights.

That's entirely possible. 

The situation's the same so what's happening is  The light that's hitting the face of the person you're photographing. Let's say it's a kid. Let's say it's a child. Um, and we'll, we'll call them, uh,  Agatha. Okay, so Agatha is the seven year old girl. Standing in front of a window, and you take a picture and she comes out dark.

What's happening is that the camera is looking at the scene and is seeing the really bright window. And,  unfortunately, the light that's coming in from the window is brighter than the light that's actually landing on Agatha's face. So, the camera's going to expose for the really bright area it sees. 

Let's say Agatha is standing inside your front room, inside your lounge. There's a big picture window behind her. Outside is the garden, looking beautiful. It's the height of summer. And the camera will probably get the exposure correct for the garden. And as you look out through the window, the lawn, the shrubbery, the trees are properly exposed, but Agatha looks really dark, possibly even silhouetted. So,  the camera's job is to look at any given scene and make a judgment call on what it thinks is the correct exposure. It doesn't always get it right, so whether you're shooting in manual, or whether you're shooting in auto, or aperture priority, shutter priority, whatever it is, the camera's still making a judgment call about what the  Right exposure is based on what is coming through the lens and what it sees it can't read your mind It doesn't know that actually the important thing to you is not a garden to be correctly exposed It's Agatha.

So you want Agatha to be correctly exposed. You're not bothered about the garden. So anyway, the camera looks at the scene, thinks, ah, that's a really bright background there. I'll just darken it down so we can get that really bright garden correctly exposed. And as it darkens down, Agatha goes dark. All right, Agatha will go dark because the camera is exposing for the bright background behind her. 

So if you took a picture of someone standing in the cave, you know, kind of thing you do every week.  And, uh, in, if you're in the inside the cave and you're an Agatha standing in the entrance of the cave, maybe a little bit inside, so there's not much light hitting her face.  The further she comes into the cave, the less light hits her face. 

But there's a really bright background behind her. The camera sees that bright background, exposes for what's outside beyond the cave, but Agatha comes out quite silhouetted. All right, I think you've got, you've got the hang of this one now.  So the question is, how do you get round it?  Do you know, I mean, I, I, I, I made a list of possible ways round this, and I've got up on the screen, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 solutions to start off with.

 And, I guess the easiest way will be just to correctly expose for Agatha  and don't worry too much about the background.  And if you do correctly expose for Agatha, so in some way you've managed to brighten the picture up so she is correctly exposed, the background behind her is going to go super bright, possibly even nuked out completely, completely whited out. 

But You have to make this decision. What's the most important thing I want from this shot? Is it Agatha or is it the background? Something's got to give . I'm going to look at what happens if you want them both correctly exposed in a moment,  but in most situations, you don't have too much luxury of time,  or equipment to get both of them correctly exposed.

So you make a decision. Agatha is the important thing for me. Why did I pick that name? Agatha. I don't know any Agathas. And my apologies if we've got loads of Agathas listening to this.  Um, is it a fashionable name at the moment? I can imagine it being, because it's a bit retro, it might be. Anyway, I'm going off on a tangent. 

So, um,  I want you then to picture the scene. Let's go into the cave, because the cave's a good one. In the cave, it's dark, and the further you go into the cave, the darker it gets. And as Agatha steps towards you, further away from the bright background behind her, less and less light's hitting her face, and therefore the contrast between the exposure on her and the exposure in the background seen outside of the cave is going to be greater. 

Let's look at a few options.  Well, it kind of depends, first of all, on whether you're shooting in manual or one of the auto modes, or the semi auto modes. So,  one of the most popular, if not the most popular shooting mode on the face of the planet is aperture priority, not manual. Most people don't shoot in manual,  even, even, um, professionals, most people shoot in aperture priority because you can pick the aperture and the camera does the rest very quickly, much quicker than you can if you're shooting in manual. 

And one of the advantages of shooting in aperture priority is that if you do come across a situation where your subjects coming out too dark, the remedy is ever so easy.   On your camera somewhere, there's a dial, or an adjustment called, Exposure Compensation. 

And, as you look in the viewfinder, you might see a little scale in the viewfinder. Um, With a little line or a light that moves up and down or left to right against that scale. And in the middle of that scale is a center point. And when your light or the needle that's moving inside your viewfinder is lined up with that center point, your picture is correctly exposed. 

Right. And in aperture priority, that's what it's trying to do, it's trying to get the little light aligned with the center point of that scale. And the scale normally goes anything from  three points one direction,  underexposed, three points the other direction, . Over exposed and can go as high as five.

So, by adjusting that scale, you can over expose by, in most cases actually, five stops, over exposed, or five stops, under exposed. Sometimes only three is visible in the viewfinder, but if you keep turning your dial, it'll go to four, and then to five. So, What it's doing is compensating for the camera getting it wrong, which is why it's called exposure compensation. 

The camera makes its best guess and let's say, uh, Agatha is two stops darker than she ought to be. Well, what you do is you adjust your exposure compensation dial to brighten her up. two stops  It's as simple as that. If you've got a DSLR, you try adjusting two stops. If she's still a bit dark, push it up another stop.

If she's a bit bright now, you can push it down a little bit, because there are third stop intervals. So, you've got this bright light. Brightness control called the exposure compensation. It's a very helpful, very useful tool. And when I was shooting DSLRs, I can tell you, I was shooting aperture priority all the time  and my thumb was constantly tweaking the exposure compensation dial.

I reckoned it was the single most important dial in my camera. Used it all the time.  Um, so. How do you find your exposure compensation dial? Well that depends on your maker camera because different cameras have different ways of doing it so you will have to check your manufacturer's instruction manual. 

Yes, I did say instruction manual.  Um, you know, that thing that's gathering dust at the bottom of the cupboard, you know, it's probably propping up the fridge or something like that. No one ever reads it, do they? Or you could just Google it, you know, Google in your camera and just put Nikon blah, blah, blah exposure compensation.

And, and someone will explain where it is and how you do it. So your exposure compensation dial brightens up or darkens down the picture. That's it. It's a brightness control. It overrides the camera settings and allows you to brighten up or darken down. So, in this picture you're taking of Agatha, if she looks dark in the, when you take a picture, you just brighten up the picture using the exposure compensation.

So the whole picture goes brighter, and you just do it sufficient in amount That you can now see Agatha's face at a brightness level that suits you, to your preference. It's, it's very um, it's very subjective. There is no right and wrong amount. You just adjust it to taste. In the same way if you're  mixing, I don't know, gin and tonic.

How much tonic do you put in? You adjust it to taste. So you brighten it up, adjusting to taste. So exposure compensation allows you to brighten up the picture or darken it down, depending on. Your preferences. So you've got full creative control. And that's one of the reasons why I like Aperture Priority because it's, it's like manual, but it's quicker and you still got the ability to brighten the picture up or darken it down if you disagree with the camera settings.

So you've taken a picture of Agatha, she's come out very dark. You grab your exposure compensation dial or switch or button or slider or whatever it is and you brighten the picture up until you're happy with it. That's a really good solution. All right. I hope you got that one.  

What about, um, I like this one, the A E L button.

If you've got one, the auto exposure lock button.  Now, not every camera has one of these, um, at the lower end of the market, that some of the cheaper cameras is possible. They don't have it, but I think most cameras probably will. These days.  And with the auto exposure lock button, once you press that button, the exposure is locked and it won't change until you take the photo.

Well, it's not entirely true. It depends on how it's set up.  So in simple terms, If you were to take a light reading off of Agatha's face, let's say you took your camera right up to her face, you filled the viewfinder with her face so that there's no light creeping in from behind her to affect the shot, and you pressed down And hold down your exposure lock button.

The amount of light that's hitting her face is measured by your camera.  And that button will lock that setting in. And if providing you don't take your finger off that button, you can step back and take a picture, multiple pictures. Provided you don't release that button, you can take it from different zooms, different angles, different distances, and she will be exposed by the same amount for every single shot, but it will be based on the light that's hitting her face. 

Where it gets  slightly more complicated is that camera manufacturers like to give us options, and with some cameras,  Um, okay, let's try and keep this as simple as possible. With some cameras,  the exposure is locked for the whole time that you're holding the button down.  With other cameras, you press the button once,  And that exposure is locked until you hit the button again, and then it goes back to normal. 

With some cameras, the button you press has more than one function. Sometimes, particularly on Nikon and some Sony cameras,  it not only locks the exposure, it also locks the focus. And we may not want to do that. We perhaps only want to lock the exposure. So you have to go into your menu system and say, okay, this button, I want it just to lock the exposure.

Or if you want, you could say, actually, I want it just to lock the focus. And then you get to something called back button focusing by using that back button, just to lock your focus. Or you can say, I want it to do both. And there were sometimes other options as well, but you have to make that decision. In the menu system of the camera now with Canon, usually, and certainly with Fuji, which is what I use, you get two buttons, one to lock the focus, one to lock the exposure.

So  for most cameras,  for me, the best option is lock the exposure. The exposure when you press the button and you only release the button to go back to normal exposure. You see, um,  the option  to press the button once and you've locked the exposure and that exposure is locked and permanently locked until you press the button again is fraught with danger. 

From personal experience,  I've had an awkward shot. So I've gone up to that person and I've  gone really close to their face, got a reading of the face, a light reading of the face, just like back in the old days with a little light meter in your hand and you held it up in the front of the face of the person you were photographing, took the readings of it, went back and adjusted your camera to match those readings and you got the correct exposure.

But now you do it with a camera. So you go up to them, point the camera at their face, press the button down and keep your finger on the button. on your thumb on that button and now you take your pictures. If you press it, if you've got it set up so that you press it once and it's locked and you take all the shots you want and then forget that you've pressed that button,  every shot you take from that point on will be exposed at those settings, regardless of how much light is actually required.

And you could end up with a whole load of images which have been incorrectly exposed.  So,  for me, that's a danger signal. I'd much rather  press the button and hold it in to make all my shots,  and then let go once I've finished. There are cases to use both, and they both have their strengths and weaknesses, but that's my personal preference.

Your preference could be different to mine. There's no right or wrong, no right or wrong. So that's the exposure lock button. So you could go up to Agatha, come right up to her face, get close enough that there's hardly any light coming in from behind her. You're just catching the light that's, or measuring the light that's hitting her face.

Hit your exposure lock buttons, walk back to where you were, focus, maybe zoom in and out, change a few angles, take a number of shots, and they'll all be taken at that particular exposure, correctly exposed for a face. That's great, that's a really good way.  

And then the last one in this section is to use a spot meter.

Most cameras these days have spot meters where something around about 2 5 percent of the centre of the viewfinder is a It's where they measure the light from. So if you put the centre of the viewfinder pointing, you know, you're pointing your lens at Agatha but in the viewfinder, you're looking just a really small area in the middle just over her face with Spot metering turned on, you'll get light measured just from that very small central section.

And that should give you a correct reading for her face. Again, make sure you turn your exposure metering system back to normal. And don't leave it in spot, because leaving it in spot is going to be bad. fraught with problems. Cause you think you're measuring the light in a scene, but it's measuring something in a scene right in the middle.

And that may not be what you want to do. So turn off spot when you're not using it because you will end up with lots of badly exposed images.    With those three options,  what's happening is you're taking control of the exposure  and giving preference to Agatha's face.  She will be brightened up and we'll see her in her full glory. 

But,  in the process of correctly exposing Agatha,  all the bright bits behind her will go really bright.  And, potentially, so bright you can't see any detail.  That may bother you.  It doesn't bother me because I'm not that interested in the background, I'm interested in Agatha.  But the question does arise from time to time. How do I get both the background and the foreground correctly exposed?  We'll look at that after this.  Hi everyone, it's Kevin Tog Talk. And I want to tell you about some exciting changes I've made to the Photography Masterclass. My in person course that's been helping photographers grow since 2019. Yep, this is an in person course in a classroom with me, face to face.

This is not online.  As we approach our 10th intake in January, I've made some significant changes to celebrate this milestone.  This masterclass goes beyond just technical skills. It's about learning to see the world as a photographer. I've shifted the focus to give even more attention to creativity with three entire modules dedicated to developing your photographer's eye.

I retained the more popular modules on shooting landscapes, photographing people, and there's a new one on black and white photography.  This masterclass is more than just a course. It's a creative one year journey you'll share with other passionate photographers growing together and forming lasting connections along the way. 

Need more information? Visit  GoHSP. com. Click on Courses and select Masterclass. I'll also provide a link in the show notes below. 

At the time of recording this podcast, um, there's actually only one place left on that particular masterclass starting in January. So if it does, uh, if it does interest you, you think it may be, it make a lovely birthday present for somebody you love, then I would not hang about. Go to the website, go HSP.

com.  Let's go. H S P H S P is obviously Hampshire school of photography.  Anyway, back to the question at heart is where we've got this young lady, we're calling her  Agatha and  she's standing in front of a bright window, or maybe it's a French window, or maybe it's a conservatory behind, or maybe she's standing in the entrance of a cave, or you're taking a picture of her in a  beautiful. Um,  multi story car park. I quite like using that as an example, cause they're quite dark inside, but where you've got the open areas open to the, to the outside air, you've got light streaming through. So you could kind of re you could easily take a picture of someone in a multi story car park and have this problem. 

Okay. So Agatha has got this big, bright background behind her.  Um,  the three solutions we've looked at so far will give. a bright  image of Agatha, but a super bright image of the background behind her.  If it's your desire to correctly expose for both, how can you do it? All right, well, the easiest solution to try and find a way of actually getting some light onto her, illuminating her as well as correctly exposing for the background is to first of all, expose for the background.

You can even take her out of the shot and, and, and. Just expose to the background, take a test shot, get the correct exposure for the background, then put her back in, take the shot, she'll come out dark, and you think, okay, how am I going to solve this one? So you've correctly exposed to the background, but she's still dark.

You can very simply  Have someone, or even her, depending on how much you heard you've got in the shot, hold a reflector.  A reflector will bounce the light that's coming in from outside onto her face and brighten her face up. Just whether the reflector will project enough light, a reflected light onto her, face  it, it will depend on the situation,

my own personal experience is that in most cases, it's not  bright, but it will make some difference, it will help, it will help. And you might only have to brighten her face up in camera a little bit,  in which case the background will be only slightly brighter. 

Now, a professional would probably do it using flash.  And, once again, you take the shot without the flash, exposing for the background. So, let's say she's standing here. In, in your home, she's standing in front of a large window, the garden's behind her, you expose a shot. In manual, might be the easiest way, expose to the background, lock the exposure off so it can't change, and with a shot which correctly exposes the garden, we know she's going to come out quite dark.

Alright, so this is fairly straightforward. So now we bring in some flash. If you've only got one of those flashes that pops up on a camera, it's going to be a dreadful shot. They take dreadful photographs. It's a small tiny point source of light that doesn't throw out much power. You've got to be super close to the subject for it to  illuminate them. 

And because it's a small point source of light you get harsh shadows. It's very unflattering. Great.  If you've got a flash gun, which sits on top of your camera, which you bought out, you know, you bought in a shop or just online and you can bounce it off the ceiling, not bad, bounce it off the ceiling. So it hits the ceiling bounces back down and illuminates her or maybe bounce it sideways off the wall and that illuminates her.

That's great.  So what you would then do is  Um, you'd ensure that there's sufficient light coming out of the flash that it correctly exposes her and  when you've got the flash illuminating her and the natural light coming in from the background, which you've already set your camera to, you end up with both elements, foreground and background correctly exposed.

Let me go back over that. So you expose to the background. The garden is now perfectly exposed. You put Agatha in the shot.  And with the flash,  um, what's the word I'm looking for here? With the flash calibrated to throw enough light for her,  the flash will only illuminate her. It won't affect the background at all.

It won't affect the garden, but it will illuminate her. So you end up with a background that's correctly exposed and via the flash, Agatha is now correctly exposed and you're saying how do I adjust my flash to do that? Oh gosh, okay. I'm going to try and keep this simple.  Flash is working two modes TTL, sometimes called ETTL or manual.  In TTL stroke ETTL. It's an automatic mode and it evaluates in The amount of light required to hit the subject. So you could switch your flash to TTL,  bounce it off the ceiling. The camera measures the amount of light coming in through the lens, and it will adjust the power of the flash to correctly expose her.

Or if you want more control, you shoot. Your flash gun set to manual, and then you just keep tweaking the settings until you get exactly the right amount of light that you like, that suits your shot.  A better solution will be to take the flash off of camera. So you're shooting in what's called off camera flash.

You'll need a transmitter  sat on top of your camera to communicate with that flash. So let's, let's go Chinese here. I don't usually buy Chinese gear, but  one of the few products that I have bought that's Chinese is Godox. Many of you will have heard of Godox. Godox are a Chinese company. They've been around for a long time, manufacturing flash and other stuff. 

Um,  it's interesting, um, that Godox make flashes for some of the Biggest names in the flash industry. So, um, those of you who shot in studios may have come across Bowens. British company, very traditionally British, high end product, created such a reputation that the system that Bowens uses to add  What's called modifiers to the front of their flashes.

So it could be a reflector, softbox, it could be a beauty dish, whatever it is. That mount between the flash and the modifiers is called an S mount. And that's, that was invented and designed by Bowens. And now most manufacturers of flash equipment will offer an S mount adapter. Or they'll sell their product with S mounts already built into them.

Yep. Because S mount is now a global standard.  But Bowens were badly affected by the Chinese imports of cheap products and went bust. 

And although they went bust, they were rescued very quickly, uh, with a financial package, um, from another company.  And all Bowen's products now are made in China by you got it Godox. So when you're actually using  the top end products in the studio, the really expensive stuff by Bowens, it's all made by Godox.

So Godox make a lot of lower price products for the average user for amateurs and their flashes, which bolts on the top of the cameras, which is a great value for money.  Maybe half, third, quarter price of, uh,  uh, name brand products like Nikon and Canon,  but they work really well. And if you had a Godox flash that you wanted to take off camera, you put the flash, maybe on a little stand somewhere in the room.

And on top of your camera, you would Mount a transmitter.  Now the transmitter communicates the camera. To the flash, which you've got somewhere else, they talk to each other. So you can adjust the setting on the transmitted, you know, to say full power, half power, quarter power, whatever. And it will change remotely  by wireless, the flash, wherever it is in the room.  And if you illuminate Agatha with an off camera flash with a softbox on it to diffuse the light, then you could throw a really lovely light at her.  Which is beautifully flattering  and the background would still be correctly exposed. So you expose to the background, illuminate her with a off camera flash with a nice big soft box and you get a beautifully lit child and a beautifully exposed garden.

So that's using flash. 

Now we get into the more  advanced  techniques.  Um,  you could use something called HDR, which is high dynamic range.  And HDR imagery can be done in the camera and it'll produce a JPEG, or you can take a number of HDR images in raw and import them into. Photoshop,  and Photoshop has an HDR facility. I'll explain what HDR is in a moment if you don't know.

Or you can load it into some kind of bespoke  HDR, HDR software, which is what I would do.  HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. Now, um,  our eyes, our human eyes, see a much wider range of tones in HDR. around us than the camera sensor is capable of with today's technology.  So we can look at a scene and we can see blacks all the way through to whites, we can see details in shadow areas, we can see details in highlight areas, but our cameras can't do that.

They're very limited. They take a picture of a really dark area and it's just black, whereas our eyes see Detail in that black.  So in order to, uh, let me give an example. Um,  okay. You want a Cornish holiday, seaside village,  beautiful summer's day  and around.  The harbour,  there are lots of beautifully bright, vivid coloured cottages. 

There's lots of bright areas, lots of white,  Um, maybe it's, I don't know, maybe it's a classic car rally, and there's lots of chrome bumpers everywhere as well, with highlights reflecting in them. But hidden amongst that, there are some Alleyways, and some doorways, and some shop entrances, which are very dark. 

And your camera will look at that scene, and it will have to make a decision. Do I expose for the highlights, or do I expose for the shadows?  If I expose for the shadows, I'll get the detail in the shadows. I can see what's happening in those doorways, and so on. But in doing so, it brightens up the whole scene, so the whites go really bright, and you're possibly blowing out some pixels, so you lose all the details in those highlights.

The other option is to expose to the highlights so that your camera takes a slightly lower exposure so that these really bright bits aren't super bright, darken the whole thing down, but now your shadow areas have gone super, super black and you can't see any detail.  Um,  so HDR  is a way of taking a photo where you get the broad range of tones from the super, super dark blacks to the super bright.

You know, reflections off of a chrome car bumper  and everything in between.  HDR will take a number of images exposing for different levels, exposing the shadows, exposing the highlights, maybe another way in between. It's not unusual.  I've done an HDR stuff in the past where I've taken nine separate exposures and combined them all together afterwards to produce a single shot which  gives you the full range of tone.

So some have been exposed for the darker parts of the picture, some have been exposed for the higher, brighter parts of the picture, and there's usually one around about the middle. And then you combine them in post processing to produce a single image.  Now, um, you don't really need to do nine times anymore because the quality of sensor technology has got so much better.

You can get away in most cases in doing three. One for the shadows, one for the highlights, and one for the mid tones. And then combine them afterwards.  So that would do. Because the bright parts of your photograph, which would be the outside garden, for instance, that'll be captured by the exposure that's been taken for that. 

The dark bits, Agatha's face, that'll be covered by another exposure, and then you get a mid tone one as well. So those three shots together, when you combine them in post processing, will give you an image which has got a full range of tones.  HDR is a subject all on its own and I'm not going to cover it in any depth, but if you wonder what HDR is, that's what it is.,  and of course it would mean you have to take the shots very quickly in case Agatha moved. Because if she moved during the shot, you'll see that.   And you probably need a tripod for that by the way, and you probably need a tripod for the next one. 

It's to take two shots. 

You take one shot of the window,  or whatever it is she's standing in front of,  and  she's not there. You take her out. So you're just taking a picture which properly exposes for the background. And then without moving the camera on the tripod, and it mustn't even move a fraction of an inch, she then goes back into the shot and you take another image where you've correctly exposed for her.

So you end up with one shot where she's not in it.  But the background is correctly exposed and then another shot where she is in it, but you correctly expose for her. And then in Photoshop, you cut her out of the shot that she's correctly exposed in and you import her into the shot with the correctly exposed background and you use Photoshop to . Reconstruct the shot. 

So look, we did spot meter, exposure compensation, auto exposure lock, reflectors, flash, HDR, and then two shots with a bit of jiggery pokery in Photoshop.  

Oh, okay.  I think  that's probably answered the question.  If you were to ask me which of those are more likely to do myself, 

Probably the exposure compensation if I'm shooting in aperture priority. If I'm shooting in manual, um, well, I don't need to use the auto exposure a lot. If I'm shooting in manual, I just go up to her face.  I adjust my settings to give me the correct exposure on her face. And then   I stand back and I take my shots.

Now, if I'm using a mirrorless camera, which we haven't even spoken about, it's a whole lot better. Easier.  Gosh, it's easy with, with those cameras. So shooting in manual on a mirrorless camera, you can see the effect of changing your settings. You can see what happens if you make changes to your ISO  or your shutter speed or your aperture.

And from where you're standing, taking a picture of Agatha, you can make adjustments on the fly and you open up your aperture or you slow down your shutter or you push up your ISO until She is correctly exposed.  Of course, your background will go super bright, but that may not matter to you.  With a mirrorless camera, everything gets so much easier. 

Okay. I'm going to call it a day. Thank you very much for listening. Don't forget to like, and subscribe. Next week, Kelly and I will be back for a joint session. Co hosting with our fun and frivolity. We do like a laugh. We do have a giggle when we're together. And, uh, in the meantime, if you, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

So  if you're not a member of our Facebook group, now's the time. Go into, go into Facebook and search for Hampshire.  photography network, Hampshire photography network. Obviously it's free, but we've got well over a thousand members now, and they're all amateur photographers. No pros or semi pros are allowed in.

We don't want anyone posting consistently amazing shots that are so good that they, you know, Actually dissuade anybody else who's just starting from sending in their pictures because they're intimidated by them. So it's amateurs only and Although we're based in Hampshire. I really don't mind where people are from to be frank I'm happy to have any photographers in the group.

So if even if you're in a surrounding County, so what surrounds Hampshire? We've got Dorset Wiltshire Berkshire Surrey and West Sussex, I think that's I think that's all of you. Yeah But it doesn't matter, you can be in Scotland, I know we have people from other parts of the country and there are people from other parts of the world.

Just delighted to have you on board. Hampshire Photography Network. Thanks guys, see you again soon. Keep taking those pictures. Happy snapping, have a wonderful Christmas and I'll see you, will I see you again New Year? Actually I will, I'm going to see you before the New Year. Because Kelly and I are coming back.

Alright, see you again. Bye!