Gracie & Cane The Boxers (Click to enlarge)
These two beauties, Gracie and Cane, visit our studio with their mom and dad at the end of each year for their holiday portraits. We always love to see them as these gorgeous Boxers bring joy and energy wherever they go. This active pair are like birds…they light for a moment before flying off again. We’ve spoken about differences in styled pet portraiture, formal as opposed to more journalistic. We’ve also spoken about how important assistance is to capturing that lovely formal photograph. Today we’re going to re-visit the exposure topic as I am getting a number of offline inquiries (please, please, pose questions and topics in this forum so we can discuss them out here in the world 
).
Gracie and Cane pose the initial challenge of how to expose Gracie (brindle) without blowing Cane’s (white) coat out. The set-up I try first is to place the darker subject on the key light side. In this case my key, or main, light is on camera right, so more light will hit Gracie. However, as you know if you’ve been trying to pose active subjects, they don’t want to stay there. Although we will continue to re-place them in the desirable spots, let’s just assume that Cane will not tolerate being closer to a strange assistant and insists on being on camera right. My hair light is on camera left. It’s lower than the key and more difficult for family members to duck so I never put them on that side. I put Terry on camera left. That means white Cane may have to be on camera right…in the line of a firing key light. In this case I will lower the settings on the lights to compensate, and set my camera to expose for the average.
Histogram. This is a very helpful and little used tool by the weekend shutterbug. In camera, it will let you know how you’re doing. During light checks, if I cannot shoot perfectly in the middle, I prefer to shoot to the right. What does that mean? On many of the Nikons (and Canons too, I believe), you will see a Multi Selector ring in the middle right of the back of the camera. This button allows you to scroll through menus. You’re trying to find the playback for more photo information. The histogram will look like a line graph. Depending upon where it was when you made your capture, you may have to tap the ring several times to find it. If most of the graph is bunched up in the middle you’re probably going to be okay. But a shot like this, with so much black background will show the graph on the left…and yet the subjects are good. That means you’re going to have to do some mental calculations to know you’ve exposed properly, unless you invest in a hand-held light meter.
In the studio I shoot with an ISO of 200 most of the time. I can adjust the other two corners of the Photographic Triangle without posing the additional noise problem that the higher ISOs will yield. If I’m relying upon the playback and histogram as many of you will be doing, your readout will tell you this image is underexposed (bunched to the left) because of the background. If you’re out in the field, you cannot control the amount of ambient light but you can control the settings. If you’re shooting in deep shade and have to use a higher ISO, adjust your other settings to be sure you are shooting to the right. You may see this explained as expose right. That means most of the histogram data is on the right. This way you can correct in post processing, but not result in a noisy image. If your data is on the left, you’ll be unhappy with the result. Be sure not to shoot with the data past the right edge, in a straight line, or you’ will have blown Cane’s coat and there won’t be any data to recover. It’s a fine line…but you can tread it with a little practice.
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