The Mannequin

{3 Ways to Correct Underexposure}

Meet Manny the Mannequin.  

I rediscovered him today.
He was abandoned on a shelf after being bought at a garage sale last year.

And he's a great poser.

:)

See, he's waving at you.

He loves it when people wave back. *hinthint*

HAH!

Did you wave?

Now he is bowing to you. What a gentleman.

Sadly, these poor photos are very dark. Technically speaking, they are underexposed.

:( Not enough light.

But never fear, dear reader. I have been learning how to fix that here, and here also.

:D

This is cool. But don't worry if you don't understand it. I didn't understand it the first time I heard it.

You can fix an overexposed (or underexposed) photo three different ways. 

Photo 1

This underexposed photo, number 1, was taken at f-stop 8.0, at 1/5 sec. shutter speed, with an ISO of 80.

How to fix an over (or under) exposed photo?

You can change the aperture. For Photo 2 I just changed the aperture from f-stop 8.0 to f-stop 3.4. The lens opened wider, which let more light in.

Compare it with the photo above. It looks a bit better. 

And notice the wire in the background is blurry? Yes. That is what happens when the aperture is set to a lower number ;) 

Photo 2

Alright. Photo 3 looks even better.

I just changed the shutter speed here.

F-stop was 8.0, and ISO was 80, same as Photo 1.

But I changed the shutter speed from 1/5 to being open for a full 5 seconds!

That let lots of light in. :) Thus, a better exposure.

Photo 3

And for this last photo, number 4, I changed the ISO. That basically controls how fast the camera lets in light. The higher the ISO, the faster it lets light in. BUT, the image quality decreases the faster you let light in. 

The ISO for the previous 3 photos was at 80, but the below photo's ISO is 1600.
So again, more light was let into the camera! But the image is much grainier.

Photo 4

Alrighty. So the three ways to correct overexposed or underexposed photos are:
Change the aperture.

Change the shutter speed.

Change the ISO.

Manny, quit showing off. You know your ballet isn't anything to write home about.

Brownie points if you learned anything from this post.

Redeemable for virtual brownies.

:)