Pixiq

Blowin Smoke

Earlier we asked our readers in the Your Photo Tips.com Flickr Group to give us some of their best one sentence photography tips and we had a great response! For the next few weeks I’ll be elaborating, in my own words, what those photo tips mean to me and how they can help you become a better photographer. So if you missed the original post you can find it at 16 Quick Tips For New Photographers.

Because this will be an ongoing series this will be where I tell you to bookmark the website or subscribe to our feed so you don’t miss the upcoming posts!

About Histograms

Surely Not not only left a good tip, he also left a great reference link.

Don’t trust the LCD screen – learn to read the histogram

Hitting the link above will send you to The Luminous Landscape which is a great resource for very detailed articles with grand explanations and charts and graphs and all that jazz.

I suggest heading over there if you ever need a more in depth insight into any thing involving the technical aspects of photography.

But here at Your Photo Tips I like to keep things rather simple and easy to understand. Furthermore, I like to look at the “why” more than the “how”.

Histograms are important to understand because they are going to give you a better glimpse at whether or not your highlights are blown out or your shadows are too dark. You really want to stay in the “sweet spot” of your camera’s dynamic range.

You really can’t trust your eyes and the LCD to do this for you because those little LCD’s don’t really have the dynamic range that a proper image (whether that’s on your computer screen or in print format) will have. So a quick check of your LCD for dynamic range purposes can actually fool you into thinking you got the shot properly exposed, when in fact, you didn’t. I know, it’s happened to me.

Most cameras have settings for viewing the thumbnail image along with the histogram. This is the setting I suggest. This allows you to check the image for composition and the histogram for exposure. It takes some getting used to but doesn’t everything in photography?

The thing with histograms is that they are very dependent on the type of photography that you do so you’ll just have to start experimenting and paying attention. The one thing that seems to be a constant (most of the time) is that you don’t want the histogram spiking at either end of the spectrum. This will result in blown out highlights or shadows with no detail.

Photograph Blowin Smoke by Surely Not