Allan Levene Photography 770.919.7993

Some thoughts on histograms

I work with histograms. They are the funny looking bar chart on the camera’s LCD screen showing a graphic representation of the image’s exposure. I’m not going to spend time describing how to look for the best histogram, but suggest that you develop your technique by working from the end to the beginning.

The usual technique is to adjust the exposure so that the graph doesn’t clip at either end, particularly the right which will show that all detail in highlights are lost. That doesn’t matter if the sun is in the photograph, but it does if you photographing a white dress with lots of details. And wedding dresses are white.

The problem is that the histograms aren’t really that accurate in-camera. Cameras are like miniature computers. They do a lot of things well but they have only a fraction of the horsepower of the laptop or desktop PCs. So here’s what to do…

First, review the histograms on your LCD screen, and then review the same image histograms using your favorite image processing program. You can have your camera on your desk and just look at both images at once. If you’re lucky, they will be very similar meaning that the exposure histogram on the LCD screen is accurate relative to the PC. But, for example, if the PC shows that the histogram is skewed to the right, and the LCD shows it in the middle it would indicate that you need to keep the histogram to the left of where you’d normally want it when you take photographs, as the camera’s bar chart is not accurate.

Further, after you have developed a wide range of images on your PC, you can find the best exposed samples. You should then turn off all of the adjustment switches you used to detail the image to print quality and look at the original histogram. For that type of scene, that’s what you need to duplicate in camera. And to see what the perfect, ready to print exposure is just copy the file back to the original camera and view the histogram on the LCD screen. You can see what that type of bar chart looks like.

Sometimes, you have to work backwards to move forwards.

Turning day into night

You no doubt know that by simply using flash you can brighten, or even turn night into day. But did you know that by using flash you can actually turn day into night.

Over the years I used many, many cameras from Robot, to Leica, to Sinar, ro Hasselblad, to Nikon and so on. Currently I use Nikons, not because they are any better than the many other brands. It’s just that I’m used to them, and they have never failed me. Come to think of that, neither have the others. They are all precision instuments. The trick is knowing how to light and when to press the button. And I don’t mean shooting 8 frames a second. That may be fine for sports photography, but it’s going overboard for weddings.

In recent years I’ve owned two Nikon D300s, a D90, two D70S and two D40. You can guess which model is my favorite. You may be suprised but keep in mind that wedding photography doesn’t demand much from a camera. Super sophisticated tracking capabilities is not important, being able to crop acceptable images from tiny sections of image files is not important, having time lapse capability is interesting but unusable and so on. There are only a few capabilities that are important to a wedding photographer. And turning day into night is one of them.

I’ll address the camera issue and describe how its done soon. Here’s an example taken in the mid-day sun. Or was it nighttime?