Get the balance right....Preventing blobsquatches

There is a little known feature found most high-end digital cameras and even some budget models commonly referred to as a Histogram. Without going into the super technical details it is simply a graph that represents complete black (left side) and complete white (right side).

 

When you take a picture of varying tones, shades and colours the histogram looks kind of like a "mountain" and when correctly exposed will appear to "peak" in the middle of the graph. You know instantly if your picture is going to be underexposed (peaks to the left) or overexposed (peaks to the right) and so you can adjust your exposure accordingly to balance things out. You need to learn how to look at the scene and understand where the exposure should be to create that perfect picture. To get the best dynamic range from a picture, you must expose it as bright as possible without over exposing it.  I use to always stay on the lower end of things because I thought it would be safe and I found myself having to take my pics into photoshop because they were always underexposed. Ever since I learned to use the histogram feature to my advantage, I have been shooting better quality pics that rarely need to be post-processed. 

This brings up a very important point - something we have seen far too much of - blobsquatches. Those grainy under-exposed photos that we are all too familiar with. It's really disturbing to find that these pictures were taken with cameras that were more than capable of taking sharp, clear pictures. So why the blobsquatches? 

1. Underexposed and too much shadow - not enough dynamic range and brightness to bring out the definition and detail of the scene. 
2. Not a high enough depth of field (Shooting with too low of an f-stop (large aperture) which keeps the object you are focusing on "in-focus" while the surroundings appear out of focus. It is these type of pictures where the blobsquatches frequently appear - in the unfocused sides of the intended target. Crank that f-stop up and get the whole picture in focus! 
3. Too high of an ISO setting can introduce noise in your picture. When possible, try to keep your ISO setting as low as possible, however, do not take that for granted. In fast-moving situations you may want to crank up that ISO to capture action shots - keep in mind that you need more light to work with that higher ISO setting. 
4. Last but not least, do not rely on AUTO. Experiment with your camera because sometimes it doesn't always calculate and select the best settings automatically. If in doubt, consider this - if your camera is capable of shooting RAW, do it, because that one "pristine shot" that you took may not have been so perfect after you get the picture home and view it on your computer - with RAW you can fix all that. JPEG's are already processed by your camera so you are limited to the amount of editing that you can perform. This is one reason why I love my camera - I can shoot RAW & JPEG at the same time so I have a copy of each. Yeah it takes more space on the memory card, but gigabytes are cheap nowadays. Happy shooting!