Knowledge is power

I have been irregularly shooting with Ricoh GR II since 2015 when I decided learning about Photography beyond taking pictures with my iPhone. My motivation has gone through peaks and throughs. I have a day time job, so during the week my excursions could not span beyond North Sydney area where I work and I had little time to allocated to Photography.

I have been unsuccessfully trying out Tav and Tv modes for years. There are so many fiddly parameters and settings I had to play with, I could never get the exposure I wanted even though conditions were close to perfect.

Then my fate changed overnight. Recently I started to fancy owning a Leica Q-P. I have done tons of reading and hours of watching YouTube videos. Then I came across the name Nick Rains,  a renowned Australian Photographer who is also the master Photographer in Leica Akademie. In his website a window popped up to download two free e-books in return to enrolling his newsletter. I said what the heck and downloaded them.

I have studied Photography from other books too, but these two little e-books "Ten Photo Fundamentals" and "Ten Lighting Challenges" are the best. They are to the point, refined and contain good examples. After reading these books I realised I was wrong in several of my assumptions all along.

Key findings:

1. I was wrong about P-mode which I had been avoiding all along. Then I found this in "Ten Photo Fundamentals":

'This mode (P) is often dismissed as a beginner’s mode but nothing could be further from the truth. Firstly, this mode automatically chooses both Shutter Speed and Aperture for you, again to match the camera’s metering recommendation. However, it does not do this randomly. Program mode picks settings based on the lens you are using...'

P, ISO 100, f/5.6, 1/500s, +0.0

2. I underestimated the importance of exposure. I assumed exposure is to do with "brightness" only, ie. over-exposed just meant too bright, and under-exposed meant too-dark. Even though these assumptions were not entirely wrong, there was more to "correct exposure". Correct exposure relates to "quality", ie. it alone defines how good your picture can be.

"A perfect exposure is one which maximizes the quality of the image data."

 The book stated " The meter gives you a good starting point if you are in a hurry, but the histogram allows you to get the best possible quality of capture." In short the chapters on "histograms" and "exposure" are must read; I learned more from them than other resources I had been reading.

I learned I should not rely on the LCD as it would have tendency to under-expose under bright conditions. What you should rely on is the histogram, you should simply aim to remove clippings.

Consider this image which is over-exposed at +0.7 EV, because I relied on the LCD and ignored the histogram reading. The light blue sky on the right hand side, just to the right of the building has a different whiteish blue tone than the rest of the sky. That is the effect of overexposure. With +0.3 EV it would have been perfect, with 0.0 EV, the tree shadow on the left would have been too dark.

P, ISO 100, f/5.6, 1/180s, +0.7