Let's have a look at the histogram. Every Tesla has a histogram. The histogram is your guide after you take the shot, so we've got the light meter to get us in the ballpark. But now the histogram is going to tell us whether the camera got it right or not whether the light meter in the middle was the right place for that to be I know sounds a little bit confusing. But if we remember that the the cameras just taken an average. And if it's got All Blacks on one bit of white than the average is going to be a dark grey.

Or if we've got lots of whites and one little bit of black, it's going to be a light gray. So that's the average. So that's what it's going to the middle wave. So we can't look at the scene engaged until read a bit of experience what the tonal range is. That's why we use the histogram. Now a lot of photographers will call it Ping is where you take a picture and you look at histogram.

And a lot of photographers will advise you not to do this. They want you to get the correct exposure straight away. But this is the easiest way to learn and what happens the white, it's like a bit of a crutch later on. As you get more and more experienced, you'll find that you don't even look at histogram, you just look on the image on the back of the camera, you'll know the camera and you'll go Yep, that's correctly exposed. But at the beginning, you need these crutches, you need to learn how to use these tools to find the correct exposure. So let's go and have a look at a histogram.

So here we are. We've put a light meter right to the middle, and it looks about correct, but let's just take an image. Now the histogram is telling us that the very brightest part of the white is up against the right hand side and the very darkest part The plaque is very close. So we're right in the middle of dynamic range, we haven't got much movement here, there's not a lot we can do. So we might decide to live with that really bright highlight, touching the edge there. And we know we've lost a little bit of why, if in doubt, what we do is we expose to the right.

So that means we push the the whites up a little bit, because what we'll find is in modern cameras, we can pull those whites back a little bit in post, so we call exposing to the right, so if we're gonna get a correct exposure, although we might want the histogram perfectly in the middle, but when you've got bright white and pure black like this, you're going to find that whole histogram is full. So what we could do is we could take a little bit more of that highlight out, so let's just take another shot. Let's just try and move the white side of the histogram. Let's try and just adjust that back a little bit. Take some of that highlight out and See where the blacks end up. So I'm just going to go down a third of a stop, take a picture.

And we can see in this shot, that the whites, they're still pressed up against the right hand side. So we're still losing a little bit of detail. I'm gonna explain that the blinkers help us with this and the next section. Now the blacks are moving down towards the side. So we have to be careful not pushing it now too much. But we're about there.

Now, this is why the histogram is so important, because our cameraman is guessing the histogram will tell us exactly where we are. Yes, we've lost a little bit of highlights in the whites, but we've got a pure highlight there. So we might expect that sometime. But what we're trying to do is get that perfect balance, get that histogram so that it's not clipping on the whites and it's not clipping on the blacks. So let me see if I can take it down a little bit more without damaging the blacks. I'm just gonna go down I never heard of a stop.

I remember But I'm just pulling that shutter speed lever on this all the time. Now what we can see is the whites have gone down, but the blacks now are really ramping up against the left hand side. So what we want to do here is we don't want to do that we don't want to lose the details in the shadows, if we're going to pull anything back in post, and what we're going to want to do is take our exposure to the right, so we're going to expose to the right so let's just go back and move those shadows away from the left hand side a little bit. So we've moved it up a third a now we can see the shadows have moved away from the left hand side. I think it's a little bit still clipping. Now you see in a straight line where it's ramping up a little bit.

You see the whites ramping up on their side either. So we're about balanced, they're just about as good as we're going to get with an image of this tonal range. But we can use the blinkers to really, really, really help So let's go to the next lecture. I'm going to talk about that little blinking light you're seeing