Improve your exposure

Exposure is one of the most important factor in photography, because it affects the contrast, the tone and the quantity of visible details.
You can improve these properties in editing, but it’s important to have it at good level from the start.
Modern camera can get good exposure automatically using a so called matrix algorithm, but you have to develope the ability to set it or optimize it manually when needed.
There are three techniques you can use:
- bracketing
- spot exposure mode
- correct manually the exposure
Using braketing, your camera will take three pictures for every shot, the first with the automatic exposure and the others with darker and lighter settings.
Having three shots for every photo is a minor problem considering how cheap memory cards are , and obviously you can really improve the chance to get at least a perfect exposure.
The spot exposure mode is an automatic exposure that use just the center of the scene, so it can be useful when the composition has both dark and light areas.
Using the spot mode you can choose the portion of the composition you want to use for the exposure, just pointing your camera.
Manual correction is the ability to modify the exposure setting one or two stops more or less when you think that the automatic setting is not giving you the right exposure.
The secrets of the right exposure is getting the most from the peculiarity of your digital camera, mainly by looking the image in your LCD and checking the histogram.
After each shot watch the result in the LCD so you can immediately know if you need another shoot with a different exposure (for example using the manual correction).
Histogram is a powerful and only apparently complex tool: is a graphical rapresentation of the picure data that shows how many dark point (left side of the histogram) or light point (right side of the histogram) you have.
A good exposure has a centered histogram, very large and without too many high or low peek.
Learning to read the histogram you can improve your ability to evaluate a picture exposure, and you will know very fast if you need another shot to get the best exposure.