The Exposure Advice That Transformed My Photography

Photography can be simplified down to the art of capturing light, and we all learn to capture that light correctly for perfect exposure. But what if that is actually hurting our creativity and work? This advice changed how I take photos.

A foundational principle when learning photography is to understand exposure and use different settings to manipulate it to capture every detail of an image. That way, we can take the image into our preferred editing suite and manipulate it however we'd like. Conceptually, this makes sense as it gives the photographer the maximum headroom when deciding where they'd like to take their image.

But what if being technically correct is actually hindering your creativity? I call this the exposure paradox—the idea that we learn one thing, yet many of the photos from those we look up to for inspiration absolutely do not follow what we are taught. It's often said that we learn the rules in photography so we can break them, but this one specifically has always been difficult for my technically oriented brain.

If you're like me, you might shoot nature photography with a very mathematical approach rather than one that might be seen as more artistic. For years, I emphasized the importance of making sure every pixel in my image was sharp by focus stacking or ensuring that absolutely no detail was lost by exposure bracketing my images for a larger dynamic range. Many times, I spent more time making sure I captured the scene "correctly" rather than thinking about what was truly important in a scene. If this sounds familiar to you, then you're in the right spot.

At some point, I had an epiphany when studying the works of those I admired. Their histograms never represented what I deemed to be proper exposure, so why was my brain so wired to make sure it was all there just in case?

When I started challenging myself to capture images without editing them, it really opened my eyes to what was important in a scene rather than simply snapping a photo and figuring it out later. I encourage anyone who struggles with what I've described to go out and spend time trying to get every single thing correct in-camera—white balance, framing, crop, and exposure. However, I don’t necessarily mean capturing exposures at 0 EV. Instead, try to expose your images for what’s important within the scene.

Doing this will help break the boundaries you might have developed over the years in your photography. It should be noted that this doesn't mean you should go out and capture completely overexposed images just for the sake of it. Instead, allow yourself to blow out highlights or crush blacks when those areas aren't details you care about within the image you're trying to create. At the end of the day, many images you capture can be edited to be what you want them to be, but this exercise is intended to help you find more creative freedom in the images you’re creating.

All of the images in this article are straight out of the camera with zero editing besides possible lens correction. I did my absolute best to allow shadows to exist in darkness and highlights to be as bright as they were in person.