Review: Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson

In Understanding Exposure, Bryan Peterson's strategy is to teach the definitions of aperture, shutter speed, ISO and their relationship in the photographic triangle.  Bryan teaches you how to use this foundation of knowledge to make technically correct exposures.  But that isn't the point of this book, his main intent is for you to take the technical knowledge and mold and shape it into "creatively correct exposures."

ISO is not discussed very much in this book and with what I believe is good cause.  If at all possible, Bryan recommends keeping your ISO as low as possible to reduce the effects of noise.  Ignoring ISO, Bryan talks about how most photographic situations have at least six technically correct exposures.  If you were to set your camera to full program mode and meter a shot the camera would give you the "correct" aperture and shutter speed based on your ISO.  You can then go into manual mode or shutter/aperture priority and increase your shutter speed by a set number of stops and decrease your aperture by the same number of stops.  Decreasing your shutter speed and increasing your aperture works the same way.  What determines the "creatively correct" exposure is the combination of shutter speed and aperture that delivers the message you're trying to portray.  Bryan sums up his intent of the book with this quote, "It's always the first priority of every successful photographer to determine what kind of exposure opportunity he or she is facing: one that requires great depth of field or shall depth of field, or one that requires freezing the action, implying motion, or panning.  Once this has been determined, the real question isn't 'What should my exposure be?' but 'From where do I take my meter reading?'"

The second main focus of Understanding Exposure is light, which Bryan describes as icing on the cake.  He discusses all basic lighting conditions - frontlight, overcast frontlight, sidelight and backlight.  He also discussing the different available metering techniques - in camera vs. off camera, spot vs. matrix and center-weighted.

After discussing light and metering, Bryan discusses specialized techniques like panning, implying motion with zoom and making rain.  Some of these topics don't really seem to belong in the book but I'd say you can take them as an added bonus.

Understanding Exposure then ends by discussing more broad topics like filters and their uses and film vs. digital photography.  Again, I can't say that these topics necessarily belong in a book about exposure but the information is all good and very useful.

Things I learned:
18% Reflectance - Basically this means that camera light meters do not see the world in black and white, they see the world as gray.  So, long story short, if you're taking a picture of something black you need to underexpose compared to what your camera tells you is the correct exposure (so you're going from the grey the camera sees to black) and if you're taking a picture of something white you need to overexpose (to get from gray to white).  The easiest way to make sure you get it right is to buy a gray card from any photo shop.

The Sky Brothers - Bryan uses the "Sky Brothers" as a rule of thumb for dealing with outdoor situations where you might have a hard time deciding where to aim for metering.  Situations can include sunny days, backlit sunrise and sunset landscapes, city or country scenes at dusk and coastal scenes or lake reflections at sunrise or sunset.

Mr. Green Jeans - Bryan doesn't really explain why this works but claims that in situations where your scene is predominately green you should manually expose 2/3rds of a stop lower than what your camera's light meter says.

Low-light Shutter Speed Calculations - As part of the photographic triangle, aperture, shutter speed and ISO are all inversely related.  This means that increasing one requires you to decrease another to keep an equal exposure.  So if my camera tells me a correct exposure is an aperture of f/5.6 and a shutter speed of 1/250 sec I can also achieve a correct exposure by increasing my exposure to f/4 and decreasing my shutter speed to 1/500.

Where this can really come in handy is in taking a photo in very low light when you want a great depth of field (a very small aperture, say f/22).  Start by setting your aperture to its largest value, say f/2.8 and you may see that your camera tells you the correct shutter speed is 1/2 sec.  To get from f/2.8 to f/22 you need to decrease your aperture by 7 stops (f/2.8 to f/4 to f/5.6 to f/8 to f/11 to f/16 to f/22) and to keep a correct exposure you need to increase your shutter speed by the same number of stops (1/2 sec to 1 sec to 2 sec to 4 sec to 8 sec to 16 sec to 32 sec to 64 sec).  Now you can just set your camera to f/22 and a shutter speed of bulb and keep an eye on your watch.  Once the shutter hits 64 seconds you know you'll have the perfect exposure.

Summary:
In the end, I'd call this book nothing short of fantastic.  Bryan's writing style is very laid back and full of cheesy analogies but they all work.  He has several exercises throughout the book to help give you real life examples that will solidify what he is teaching.  The book is also jam packed with beautiful pictures that perfectly highlight what he is teaching.  He even has many images that show you what changes were made and how they effected the final image.

If you could only buy one book to get you started in photography, I'd recommend Understanding Exposure over anything else I've read.  And it's not just for beginners, I think every level of photographer could learn a lot from this book.

Ratings (out of 10):
Content - 9
Images - 8
Writing Style - 9
Overall - 9

If you'd like to see more of Bryan Peterson you can check out his online photography school, The Perfect Picture School of Photography here.  PPSOP offers online photography classes in just about any topic you can think of, a blog and numerous free video tutorials.

You can also find his other books on Amazon, like Understanding Shutter Speed,  Understanding Close-up Photography, Learning to See Creatively and Beyond Portraiture by clicking here.  Please note that by using the amazon links to make your purchases you help keep this page up and running :)