My ETTR / EXPOSE TO THE RIGHT Photography Technique | The Wilderness Photography Expeditions S1E1

my name is Dave morrow 9 months of each year I live in the wild surrounded me in all directions thousands of miles of pure wilderness no roads no people no internet no photography hotspots or social media likes no top 10 tips to help you out these things don't matter here they never did and never will I come here to challenge my fears and improve my craft landscape photography my backpack is filled with two weeks of food camera gear and tripod a shelter a topo map and compass and a GoPro to document the experience I travel by foot this is all I need the series teaches my entire image creation process the constant struggle to learn and improve the drive to solve problems and create better photographs my goal is to teach you what I know and the path used to get there I challenge you to abandon the herd leave the hive think for yourself stop chasing internet fame followers and likes blazed a new trail create new ideas teach others your path devote every second to your craft so thanks for watching and welcome to the wilderness of photography expeditions so we are out on day one of a six-day backpacking and photography trip taking up this 50 mile long river that source lies out in the middle of a huge wilderness so think of like a vast swath of old-growth forest trees 1,500 to 2,000 years old and it's probably about 350 miles crossed and the center of that there are eight to nine thousand foot glaciated Peaks so all that glacier melt feeds these rivers and they also just happen to be so wet that they're the perfect environment for temperate rainforest so what I'm walking through right now is ancient forests and our goal is just to make it up this river far enough set up a base camp and then we'll do a bunch of day hikes out to explore this specific area we'll move our ten again and then kind of repeat the process so hopefully we'll get some pretty good shooting done make some videos as well but it's perfect stretch of weather to be out here sunny pretty warm nice intermittent light coming through the forest can't really beat it so I just put my bag down and we're gonna stop and have coffee and eat lunch real quick but also looking for some compositions in this really nice grove of trees I think it's kind of just like flat open on the ground some nice ferns then in the area I was trying to look for kind of line it up with the light coming from back that way it's just a little stream I think it might be hard to do now the sun's moved a bit though because everything is just dead back here so what I'm looking for it's basically an area that has some shadow detail but also gets touched on the edges of the ferns and the tree by light it's kind of diffuse there other tree's back that way so it's see like all these trees have this really nice diffused light around the edges which provides great depth in the photo the hard part is just picking out a composition and then even when the composition looks good on the back of a small camera screen you usually get back to the computer at least I do and there's not many good ones on there maybe get one or two so two I can find back here get set up and take it a few different compositions so today I want to discuss a technique that is extremely important for landscape photography and that it's called exposed to the right or also known as et TR so I'm going to show you why it's important and how I use it for every single one of my landscape images so for example I'm going to be shooting this scene right in here so what I'm gonna do here is I'll first set up the composition you can see it right here on the screen so I'm balancing one side with the really nice light coming right here and then the bottom of the composition is right here by these bushes so that lights kind of pushing the eye and through here and then I'm balanced on the right side by these trees so pretty nice light coming through giving me nice to find edges on all these trees should look pretty good so the first thing I'm going to do and I'll expose to the right using exposure compensation here at moment but first I'll get this shot set up so I'm just going to use a single point spot focus zoom in at 100% and focus on the approximate hyper focal distance for this shot I'm gonna go with ISO 64 which is based for this camera which is a Nikon d810 and I'm gonna shoot at f11 so if I pull up the RGB histogram here I now have control of it using exposure compensation so I'm shooting an aperture priority mode if I go darker and exposure conversation this bar will drop the histogram will shift to the left if I go higher an exposure compensation the image gets brighter histogram shifts to the right so my goal as a landscape photographer is not to match the histogram on the back of my camera to the scene or the light that I actually see my goal is to maximize the amount of light my camera can capture exposing as bright as I possibly can for this scene without blowing out the highlights and that will give me a whole lot of extra detail down in the darks which I wouldn't have had if I had a standard exposure so for example let's say I'm looking at this scene so if I look at this scene and I match the back of my camera to what I actually see out here with my eyes by making an exposure compensation either go up or down this back of the camera looks very close to what I see here with my eyes but what you'll notice if we look really closely at the histogram is that it only goes about 75% of the way towards pure white so I'm missing out on all this information that I could expose for up here but the big part of missing out on is all this dark detail down here so instead of shooting this exposure which matches what I can actually see with my eyes I'm going to grab exposure compensation right here and I'm going to move this histogram all the way right until the very right-hand portion of the histogram representing the brightest pixels in the image are touching pure white so if I just increase exposure compensation you'll see that bar off goes up and my histogram moves to the right now a few different caveats about the histogram that you see on the back of your camera if you're shooting in RAW what you should be for landscape photography this histogram is actually a JPEG representation so what the camera does is it takes the raw file and then it gives you a JPEG review on the back of your camera screen so the RGB histogram that you see with live view or on image review after you take the shot it's actually a JPEG RGB histogram so what you're gonna find is that even though I'm pushing my exposure all the way to the right making the brightest pixels in the image touch pure white that doesn't mean that that will actually be the case when I get home on the raw file because the raw file has a lot more detail in the darks and in the highlight regions than the actual JPEG file does so I'm gonna do an experiment and then we can look at these on the computer and I'll show you what I mean so the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm just going to decrease or increase my histogram using exposure compensation until it touches the very white edge there that looks good so I can see there's a whole lot of darks in this current composition or image which are represented right here so that's a big spike in the dark mid-tones then it drops as you get towards the mid-tones meaning there aren't many parts of the image or many pixels in the image represented there in the mid-tones and then as you get closer in closer to pure white representing all these really bright portions where the Sun lights hitting the trees there aren't many pixels represented at all so I'm gonna take this first image right there and now that I've taken that first image I'm going to review the histograms and the sharpness of it but then I'm going to increase by one stop two stops and then three stops and exposure compensation and I want to see how far I can actually push my raw file since this is the JPEG representation of my histogram I want to see if I can go one stop two stops or three stops pass that JPEG representation without still blowing out my raw file and the only way to do that is to kind of test it in the field and then you'll know how many stops pass pure white on the JPEG RGB histogram you can actually push your exposure and still be good to go for the raw file once you get back home so if this doesn't make sense yet it will once I hop onto the computer so just hold with me a second so there's that image looks good I'm gonna check the focus first make sure that sharp because if it's not focus the image is worthless so that looks good and then I'll just check the histograms see the RGB looks good and remember these are JPEG histograms and you're seeing a JPEG image here so you don't actually see the raw file just jpg I can't see that raw file until you get home and then red green and blue look good all right so that's exposed to the right for the JPEG file what I'm gonna do now is grab exposure compensation again and I'm going to increase this my Eevee by one stop so those each of those little tick marks is one full stop the small tick marks are one third of a stop so I went from negative 2/3 exposure compensation to plus one third so you can see that my RGB histogram for the JPEG image is now falling off the edge I'm gonna take this first shot so now I'm going to increase by another stop see right here increase my exposure compensation my histogram goes even further off the white edge now you can see that this JPEG file appears to be really blown out if I have my highlight blankies on they're all blanking but that still doesn't mean that the raw files blown out you can also see my histograms are way off the edge here so for the sake of it I'm gonna also increase by one more stop here so right there so when I get home from this trip I can look at these multiple different exposures and I can compare them and I'll see how far past my actual RGB histogram exposure pushed all the way to white I can get with my raw file exposure and by maxing that out in the field I'll know that I'll get a lot more dark detail and then I can darken the image down anywhere I want and post so long as I didn't blow up the highlights and so long as I retain the shadows I can move that histogram no matter where I want so capturing images out in the field is all about maximizing the data collection from the scene without losing any of the highlight details when you get home you actually want to darken that image back down then you expose to the right in the field and put that histogram what it actually looked like to your eyes without looking at the scene so data collection in the field at home putting the histogram where it actually represented for the real scene souta's around 4:00 in the afternoon right now we stopped and shot that location for probably an hour and a half light was really good but sunsets in about an hour so we have to really push it to you the camp before it gets dark it's a pain in the ass bushwhacking after dark trail not so bad but this not easy but as we were following the river up kind of got to a place where just wind it straight eroded cliff balls on both sides so we had to climb up above it that's when we got stuck in the jungle so we were just climbing through that or maybe falling through that for the last hour but headed the final step to camp right now who knows how long that will actually be how's it look good that's a pretty big job yeah it doesn't look like there's any way down through there at all I'll check up here Oh foot here's the spot right here we can get down really big tree behind me it goes way up pretty cool Smosh covered everywhere headed straight through here [Music] that's the that's the signal in beacon for the right way to go from the leader iearnt ass what a good night to be out here I'm really excited to be base camped out of this area to do some exterior sixth oreng of it over the following week or so I brought one of the pack rafts that I have cuz I figure we may have to cross the river but now that I see sorry how high the actual river is we could have actually exited on pack rafts which we did this spring but it was a lot lower this spring right now it's so inundated with water that there is not that many tough Rapids but it's really fast-moving coming out over the river here oh you can actually see the the cliff that we had to get up above right there's the cliff face so we had to climb up here right above that and then we came back through there now we're headed right around the river down this way back down to the river I found a place with a small shoal we could walked up but I was looking at where these clouds drop down into this rainforest up here and we kind of have the same thing going on here on the side we're on but tomorrow morning just after the Sun peeks over the top of the horizon which is blocked up by light about 3000 foot Peaks this point so it doesn't really come up until like 9:30 but once it does it's usually really nice light rays coming through down into all these forests because those clouds haven't burned off for the day yet and each night clouds start to sink back into the valley again you get really lucky like we have where the day has no clouds and your Sun you get those perfect forest shooting conditions it's really nice alright guys so I have the photos loaded up on my computer and this very bottom photo is actually from next week's video which is day two of this backpacking trip where we get some really nice light in the forest as well you also get to see some really nice landscapes that I backpack through so you can tune in for that next Tuesday but for today's video I'm gonna first cover these four examples that I just shot in the field the nominal exposure +1 +2 and +3 II V and then I'm also going to go through some other examples of exposed to the right techniques and why the specific color in the scene being the brightest dominant color and the scene really affects what your overall exposure should be so we'll look at these images which are all exposed to the right and we'll discuss their different colors and how that applies it's the actual exposure that I've dialed in so let's first look at these this first image right here if I click on it I hit D for develop module you'll see that it is exposed for the highlights only now I always put these on Adobe neutral on some cameras this is called Adobe flat that's going to give you the best representation of your actual raw file when you use like Adobe landscape or vivid it applies way too much color and contrast so you don't have the chance to bring in that really nice color and contrast later in post-processing I'd rather start it at neutral or flat profile and then add the color and contrast myself giving me more control over the dark details so what we can do is we can look at this histogram and you'll see that in the field when I expose for this it looked like that and like that so it was touched all the way to the right I had barely any left on the side of the darks over here in the blacks but if I go to what I get back on the raw file you'll see that it dropped the exposure slightly darker and now I have room here the RGB histogram comes up right in here and it ends right there and then we have the yellow histogram and the red histogram which represent the yellow and red color channels almost all the way up to the right so if I look at this scene and i zoom in here you can see that this image is perfectly exposed for the color yellow only where that bright sunlight hits the edge of the trees and that's the only part of the scene that's well exposed there the downside of this is that back here and the shadows if I tried to pull the shadows out there's hardly any detail back in there if I used exposure to do it I can retain a lot of information back there but you can see that it's really degraded it's noisy the colors not that good and it's just not a great exposure of the scene so what you're gonna see if i zoom back out here is that anytime you're shooting the color yellow yellow is very close to white as perceived by our eyes and you guys can reference my color Theory photography guide and this talks about the science underlying and how these sensors work and how your histogram is work and it'll help you to visualize this so if you just google Dave Morrow color theory or I'll leave a link right below this video as well and that's a free PDF you can download and read and take out shooting with you but essentially when you're exposing for bright yellow in the field my rule of thumb is that I push the RGB histogram in the camera as bright as possible but I don't push it any beyond that because you'll see that when we expose for this shot in the field Mr Graham looked like that but now I'm going to go to the next shot which will is a one stop increase in exposure compensation you can see this is at one tenth of a second f11 ISO 64 this is at 1/4 of a second so it's about a one stop increase about a stop and a third here's F 1164 so the shutter speed went from one tenth and it got longer so now we have more light in the scene so what you're gonna notice here is though I push my exposure a little bit too bright in the field and this is a main example that I wanted to use shooting these trees so you guys would see this if I go to neutral here I can come over to the brightest portions of this photo and even if I drop the highlight down and the exposure I'm still blowing out this color beyond the point of being able to recover it in post so when I'm shooting yellow in the field I'm always taking two specific separate shots I'm taking one for the bright yellow highlights and then I'll take a second to expose for the dark details and I'll normally take that second shot around stop to a stop and a half brighter because you'll notice if I go down to this shot right here which is two full stops brighter I have all this detail now back here that I didn't have on the previous shot so you can see this is almost starting to look normal back here if I brought the shadows up a little bit or the exposure you can see that I have a lot of nice color and light back in this area but I'm completely blown out in the yellows here so what I would have to do is I'd have to blend both of these shots together meaning the one exposed for the highlights and the one exposed for the shadows to get the shot I wanted there's no way around that even with the best dynamic range cameras currently on the market the d800 the d810 the D 850 Sony a R 3 a R 2 or whatever they're called there's a really good dynamic range cameras they can capture the highlights and the shadows but they still can't get around shooting scenes like this so you have to kind of know what you're shooting here and you have to know that if you're shooting for the highlights meaning really bright yellow or really bright red or really bright orange you want to push that exposure in the field so it's touching the very edge but you don't want to go beyond that so that case is just for yellow red orange those really bright colors as you learn in my color theory guide so let's go to another example and let's go to something that doesn't have a really bright color in it so let's go to this shot right here this was taken out on a 10-day backpacking trip in the mountains and you'll notice that the RGB histogram here is pushed all the way over to the right so when I was shooting in the field my RGB histogram actually looked something like that I had pushed it a full stop and a half past touching white in the field when I got home it turned out to be right about there so for this shot when I edit it what I'll actually do is I'll darken it down a little bit like this and what you're gonna notice here if I darken it down like that and I start to bring my whites up I can darken it even more but the nice part about this is that I can pull up this shadow detail I could drop my blocks a little bit here this is just a quick edit I would take much more time if I was actually gonna edit it but you notice that all this shadow detail down here is perfect there's really nice color sharpness all throughout it and the reason being is because my actual exposure for this scene was way up here so if I darken this down to what I actually saw with my eye as well shoot him I still have the chance to pull the shadows way up and this puts them back where they actually were so I'm not gonna degrade the image quality from pulling the shadow slider up because I captured all that color light and detail for the shadows in my original image so when you're exposing to the right you're capturing all this dark detail down here you wouldn't have collected otherwise but you still have the chance to darken your image wherever you want and post-processing and dial it in so it looks really nice in the final result so now I can use the shadows if I want because I know that all this detail has already been captured so that is a shot where I'm exposing for like a magenta or a pink up in the sky so this isn't quite red but you'll see that red and blue are the furthest right color channels on the histogram so if we look at this shot this was taken on another long backpacking trip in the mountains probably about seven days and if you look here you can see our camp right down here we climbed way up on this peak to get this shot but there's my tent there's my buddy s irons tent down there so we're just tucked up on this saddle so this shot is obviously way too bright when you look at it when I exposed in the field the histogram and the shot looked like that when I got back on the computer it looked like that but if I drag this down to what I actually saw with my eyes it's something like that and I could just this for a while but I'm not gonna bore you guys with that but then I get all this dark detail down here and if I needed to pull any of it out that's not a problem because I captured that dark detail and the original exposure not that I would pull the shadows out there but I have the ability to do so because the actual exposure captured all those shadows in the initial shot so so long as you don't blow out any of the color channels or your RGB for the raw file you can shoot anywhere you want in the histogram pushing it as far bright as possible without blowing anything out so my goal is just to expose for the brightest color in the scene for this it was pink so I probably pushed my histogram all the way to the right in the field meaning right about here and then one stop past so something right in there so your files in the field are gonna look really funky and that's why it's key to be able to test this do some experiments before you go out and start using this technique because you'll notice that all my shots look horrible like you would never want this shot to be your final image but all I'm doing is I'm maximizing all this dark detail and when I get home I can drop it to what it looked like where I was actually out there shooting but I still have the added benefit of collecting all this dark detail down here I wouldn't have otherwise so I have really good image quality because my camera is capturing so much more light from the scene so for this one I was exposing for like a red so when I shot it in the field I would probably had it all the way up to the edge and then about a half a stop beyond when I shoot red in the field I push my histogram all the way to the edge and then I go about one half to one stop beyond depending on if it's direct light or not so test that stuff out take a bunch of practice shots now let's look at this picture this is from a climb we did so this is facing the opposite direction of this peak so here's the summit block on the peak and here's my friend Derrick he's almost up to the top so that's the last part of the climb but you can see we're pretty high up above all the mountains and this is a huge glacier which kind of just goes down into another large glacier field but when I'm shooting shots like this when I reset this one so this is a very neutral shot meaning the brightest color in this shot is white so what you can do for these at least what I do when I'm shooting in the field is I'll push my histogram on the camera in the field all the way right so it looks something like this and then I would push it about a stop and a half beyond that so something right in there so the benefit of this is you'll notice that this all looks like it would be blown out but when I get back to the computer it drops back somewhere in there and the added benefit here is that when I darken this back down to what it actually looked like I can pull these shadows up and look how much detail is in those shadows and there's no image degradation at all because my actual exposure was bright enough that it captured all those shadows in the original shot so this is the best way to capture images in a way that allows you to retain the most dark detail and have the most malleable image back at home so here's the last one we'll look at if I reset this one this one has red and yellow being the brightest colors so in the field I push the R histogram all the way to the right and then I just left it there because when I'm shooting bright red and bright yellow I push it all the way to the right and I don't exceed that because I know red and yellow blow out very quickly so when I get back to the computer do that and then I can move this histogram wherever it's necessary but I have the added benefit of really nice detail down here that I wouldn't have otherwise now the color balance is off on this one it'll take some work to get back but I just wanted to show you guys that if you're exposing for any shot so long as you don't blow out any of the color channels or the RGB channel and the highlights you can back it back down anywhere you want but if you under expose say somewhere down in here you can't just create this information out of nowhere this information also is all created by the amount of light your camera sensor collects so if I were to have a shot that was really underexposed like this one I can't just create information back here without getting noise or degrade color and image quality so you can't just go up like this infinitely and expect the image to be really good quality because you didn't actually collect light information about this part of the scene so you're gonna always have a lot of noise there so if you guys want to learn more about this check out my color theory photography guide and you can always check out my camera sensor size an image quality guide which I will link below as well so you really gonna have to practice this stuff it's not gonna make sense until you go over it a bunch of times and it's really important to learn about how histograms being the RGB red green and blue channels work in the field and then how they work on the computer just try to remember that in the field you're capturing as much information about the scene as possible without blowing out any pixels and then when you get back home on the computer you want to move that histogram back to match something that you actually saw with your eyes while treating they're in the field so I will see you guys next week on Tuesday thanks for watching but

Channel: Dave Morrow

Views: 77,287

Keywords: Dave Morrow Photography, Photography, Landscape Photography, Dave Morrow, ETTR, Expose to the right, landscape phototography

Id: NQU4_CzvHLQ

Length: 33min 4sec (1984 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 26 2019