Exposure compensation for wildlife photography.

hey guys this is janine from pangolin photo safaris and today i'm out here on the toby river for you in order to talk about all the different myths surrounding exposure compensation and why it is a good idea to have a variable exposure rather than having it fixed if you do like our videos please don't forget to subscribe and press the bell button just down below here in order to get notifications whenever there's new videos coming out [Music] exposure compensation is quite a touchy subject i get a lot of guests that like to shoot on a fixed exposure let's say a minus one third even minus 0.7 they always like to under expose a little bit some people like their images a little bit brighter and they hardly change it they might have shot 15 20 years but they will hardly ever touch their exposure compensation which is fine if you shoot in a studio environment where you always try and achieve neutral tones however if you shoot out here wildlife then a lot of times your wildlife only takes up a small portion of your frame and then you have to rather expose for that little portion of the frame than your background a neutral exposure will not get you what you wanted so at the moment i'm sitting here on the riverbank and i can see to my left hand side we have the bright bright shaby river with the bright blue sky so the backgrounds are all very bright and on the right hand side i have those beautiful jacketberry trees with those deep shadows coming in in the late afternoon some and we have a few e-grids fishing here and if i would go on a neutral exposure or let's say minus one-third for instance yep as i thought i'm completely burning the bird the bird looks way too bright so much so that i cannot get my highlights back how do i know you'll see the blinkies in the back of your screen if you want to learn more about blinkies please check out danielle's video on youtube in order to figure out how to turn those on so what do i need to do in order to get that white egret right i'm going to start off on minus one and it looks a lot better for me but i still find that the bird is extremely bright i want some more detail in there yeah look at this with these shady backgrounds they turn completely black how beautiful is that that was now a full minus three that sounds extreme but out here you often have to do that in order to get the desired shots in neutral exposure wouldn't have gotten you there and i know that a lot of times in digital photography we strive to preserve these highlights once we get those highlights burned we struggle to get them back which is the reason a lot of photographers have their camera permanently set slightly below zero however if we now shoot in a very dark environment i would actually suggest to overexpose a bit dark environment as in our eyes always very high because if you have to pull these shadows back up in post-production you will see the noise a lot more in these shadows than if you overexposed and pull them down so under exposing is not always the magical number in order to get the perfect shot talking about exposure further what am i going to do if i have a beautiful bird now passing me in flight the fishy got just coming past her if i'm on a -3 shooting into the bright sky i will see nothing of the fish eagle it will be completely underexposed so now i need to quickly change it therefore it is really important that you know where to change your exposure and not just know it by looking it up somewhere on your camera but actually blindly you need to be able to change your exposure while looking through the viewfinder please practice that it will help you so much and then number two it is irrelevant really in that moment where your exposure ends up you don't have time to go and really do the fine tuning here all you know is you need to bump it up so wherever your exposure compensation sits give it just a little swirl with me it is the swirl of a finger on top here on the right hand side so as i would turn around i would quickly move my exposure up regardless where it ends it will be in the right vicinity and i will have a much easier time now to fix it in post-production as if it was completely off so what is the rule of thumb for exposure compensation out here if you have a really bright subject in comparison to your background you will need to under expose and if your subject is much darker than your background you will need to overexpose how much depends on how strong the contrast is between your subject and your background it also depends on how big your subject is in your frame if your subject is only a small portion of your frame then your camera wants to expose on the background so you have to compensate a lot for it if your subject nearly fills your entire frame your camera automatically exposes correctly on your subject and you don't need to compensate so much anymore it is a matter of practice the more you do it the better your feeling for it will become but test it out it's a lot of fun to play with your exposure compensation and don't be fixated on one thing on a minus 0.3 or plus 0.3 it will it will not get you the best results at all times i hope this little trick helped you and exposure compensation became a little bit more clear to you if you did enjoy this video please do please don't forget to press the like button down here and let me know what you think it's extremely interesting to talk about exposure there's a lot of different opinions out there and every artist has a different eye so i would like to know what you guys think have a great day bye bye

Channel: Pangolin Wildlife Photography

Views: 43,166

Keywords: exposure compensation for wildlife photography, exposure compensation for bird photography, exposure compensation, wildlife photography, exposure compensation canon, exposure compensation canon 5d mark iv, exposure compensation canon 7d mark ii, exposure compensation canon 80d, exposure compensation examples, exposure compensation explained, wildlife photography tips, nature photography, pangolin wildlife photography, pangolin photo safaris

Id: 6auHlQ0wDCM

Length: 7min 2sec (422 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020