Exposure

This book came to my attention thru another blogs comment section and I ordered the book for my flight read from NY to the Eastern Sierras workshop with Moose Peterson. My timing on ordering the book and the book’s content could not have been any better !

Here is a book written by a Master Photographer with excellent field and fine print sales credentials.  For author, Sean Arbabi this is his first book copyrighted in 2008, after 20 years as a pro-photographer. In the the book’s introduction he had me hooked by writing …… ‘This is what the art is all about, especially in outdoor and travel photography, to notice the beauty of the world, catch the details, and stop a moment of time, recording it for all to see and appreciate. And it all starts with exposure’

For me, I have been plucking exposure gems of information from a few publications, workshops, discussions, and trial and error on how to master exposure.  I find it difficult to accept the KISS philosophy of setting the camera to aperture priority, tune up/down EV compensation and fire away…that may come to me with another few years of experience..but for me, on my journey, there is more to the art and essence of using exposure in my Images.  The KISS philosophy bangs up against the tonal dynamic range and working with stops of light from shadow to highlight. It seems fraught with error to embrace that with just the DLSR’s metered 5 1/2 to 7 stops (contrast vs the eyes 12-15 stops), that you can simply have the correct exposure by adjusting for blinkies with your EV after LCD review.

No, not for me anyway, selectively using my metering mode, (spot/matrix),  and using shutter and aperture in manual mode appears to be my preferred  picture taking process. How to understand the light, how my camera sensor sees the light and to creatively set up my DLSR using all of its capabilities to capture the emotion of the Image that I am experiencing…and do it repeatedly, accurately and adaptively  that is my primary goal and future knowledge baseline for me right now.

This book is not just a how, although it  does, provides step by step lessons, guidelines and learn by doing assignments.  The subject mater contains technical information relating to  DLSR metering, equivalent  exposue, basics such as shutter stepup and aperture charts.  Author/pro-photographer Arbabi, provides guidelines on the qualities of  directional lighting (frontlite, backlit, sidelite), choosing metering modes, ever changing light, creative tips, flash…then there are the images as examples, this man has been all over the world, quality images published by Watson-Guptill Publications,  abound from Yosemite, Alabama Hills, Mexico, Borneo, Florida Big Cypress, Patagonia…it is one thing to write from the office but another to lead and teach thru field experiances.

This book is now my go to tool for understanding and improving my exposure at point of capture…. the journey continues, and I’m loving it….

Sean Arbabi Website

Sean Arbabi Blog

Have a look for yourself: Amazon.com First Chapter Link