Before we get going, we need to understand what an exposure actually is. So if we want to understand what an exposure is, we have to understand what are dynamic ranges. And these might be new terms. But once you understand them, they're not that complicated. So let's go and explain how a dynamic range works and how our exposure depends on the dynamic range. Now, the dynamic range is the range of light that the camera can actually read.

Now, we have to capture the whites and the blacks. If we don't capture all the whites and blacks in a scene, and when we talk about whites and blacks, we're talking about the tonal value. But just imagine for a moment that you the back of your camera wasn't in color it was in black and white, you would see different shades from black to white. So you'd have black and then dark gray, and you'd move up through the spectrum. That is what is called the dynamic range of a camera. So, when we take a picture, for correct exposure, we have the detail in the back and detail in the white.

And what that means is that we can see in the shadows we can see some detail and in the whites, we can see some detail. And the way to illustrate this as a seesaw. If you keep the seesaw balanced, the blacks and the whites will be a correct exposure. Now what happens is sometimes when we take a picture We will underexposed the picture, so it's darker than it should be. And when we do that, what is happening is some of the blanks will fall off the end of the seesaw, and you will no longer have any detail and then what will happen they will just show black so some dark Gray's become blank, and now you've lost the detail. And the same if we overexposed if we take the picture and it's too bright, what we're going to see is the whites are going to lose detail.

And the best way to see see this is take a picture of a cloudy day when you've got some bright cloud and overexpose that picture. And you'll see you'll lose some of the the subtle tones the light very light Gray's. You'll lose those because dynamic range has moved along. And the same if you take a picture of something that's got shadow in it. So maybe you take a picture of some words, or some bushes and you see some shadows. If you underexposed if your picture is too dark, you're going to lose details in the blacks.

So whenever we take a picture, we want to balance like I see. So we want to make sure we've got the whites and we've also got the blacks in our image and if you can keep this image of a seesaw in your mind, as we go through the next sections, we will use some tools to show us how to see if the seesaw is balanced or if the seesaw is leaning to one side or the other. But what is important to understand is when we get a correct exposure. We want all the dynamic range in the tones in our picture. So we want the details in the blacks, but we also want details in the y's. I know it sounds technical, but if you need to go over this a couple of times, and please watch it again a couple of times, we want the detail.

And if you have that in your mind, and you understand why dynamic range is important, we don't have black shadows. And we don't want to have pure white clouds. We want to find that perfect balance. Now one thing to know is is that each camera is capable of a certain dynamic range. Some dynamic ranges in the more expensive cameras tend to be wider. In the cheaper cameras, they tend to be narrower.

Don't want us to get too bogged down in that. What I want us to understand is a camera has a dynamic range, whatever is capable of, we want to capture the blacks and we want to capture the whites with details in the blacks. We want to be able to see in the shadows and we want to also be able to see details in the whites. If we're taking pictures of clouds. We want to see the light Gray's as well.