Exposure and Lighting For Digital Photographers Only

preface

When I talked to some of my photographer friends about this book, they were surprised by the "For Digital Photographers Only" part of the title. They usually made some comment to the effect that, although digital imaging has revolutionized many things about photography, exposure and lighting are still pretty much the same whether you shoot digital or film.

That's an understandable response from a bunch of former film photographers who gradually migrated to digital photography. They learned to do everything manually with film, and they've adapted that knowledge and experience to the new digital photography tools.

However, the title makes more sense for the new generation of photographers who may have never used a camera without auto-focus and auto-exposure capabilities. All those automatic features are great, but sometimes even the best automation fails, and the photographer must override the camera's automatic settings to get the shot. And sometimes you just want to exercise more creative control. The problem is that the automation that makes normal shooting so much easier can actually make manual overrides harder. Today's highly automated digital cameras tend to hide and disguise fundamentals that were obvious on old manual cameras.

For example, unless you're old enough to have gray hair and bifocal glasses (like me), you've probably never used a camera just a few mechanically timed shutter speeds, each of which doubled the previous speed. Modern cameras with electronically ...