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| © Elke Dennis / Fotolia |
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• Fundamentals: Frame-filling glamour portrait with great tonal range.
• Framing: When a model strikes this pose (reclining, propped on one elbow), most photographers would yield to the tempation to show her stretched out horizontally. But she's in a vertical, portrait-style frame.
• Lighting: Soft, even light keeps her skin smooth and feathers textured. Highlights are where they should be -- lips, eyes, and glossy headband.
• Tones: Span the full range. Details in the white feathers and black bodice stand out, but there's plenty of midtone in the skin.
• Angle: Because the model is reclining, her head is tilted, coming in diagonally from the corner. (The feather boa hides how strained her neck probably looks in this position.)
• X Factor: The model's tilted head and body, bisected by the serpentine boa, create an X shape that fills most of the frame. And that vertical lock of hair is just the kind of imperfection that makes the composition perfect.
5 Ways to Meter Midtones
Your camera's lightmeter makes what you aim it at appear medium-toned (or medium gray, in black-and-white terms). Usually this makes a good exposure, but not if your scene is full of tonal extremes. The badly exposed shot (upper right) is how a centerweighted meter reads a scene with a lot of detail in darker areas: The sunlit foliage is blown out.
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| © Timothy Edberg |
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Here are five ways to get the midtone right, once you've spotted it:
1. Move close to a midtone subject, meter it, and return to your original position to shoot. To get the good exposure (lower right), I drove to the end of the road, metered on the sunlit foliage, added half a stop, then drove back to shoot.
2. Use a spotmeter on a midtone detail. No spotmeter? Isolate the detail with a longer focal length by zooming or switching lenses.
3. Meter off an 18 percent gray card. Or meter off the palm of your hand and add exposure, about 1 stop for light skin. (It helps to compare readings from a gray card and your palm in advance, so you know how much to compensate.)
4. When outdoors, apply the Sunny 16 rule: Shoot at f/16 with a shutter speed close to 1/ISO sec (e.g., 1/100 sec for ISO 100) or the equivalent. On overcast days, add 1 stop; for heavy clouds add 2 stops, and, if your subject is in the shade, add 3 stops.
5. Right after the shot, check your digital camera's histogram reading for blown-out highlights and dropped-out shadows. Then adjust your exposure accordingly, and try again.
And in tricky light, bracket your shots -- that is, take several at different exposures. That way you're certain to get one good image.
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