In a recent revelation, I’ve begun to realize how much where you meter you picture from matters, for instance, in order for the night scene to appear well lit, you need to meter the image off of a spot you want “normally” exposed and lock the exposure to that point. A lot of times in the past I’ve metered off of the light source itself and ended up with horribly underexposed photos. Not what I wanted, but I didn’t completely know it at the time or really think about it until I noticed that I was always pulling up the exposure. Its one of the hardest things I’ve come to, shooting in a way that normally gives slightly over exposed pictures, because its much easier to pull down an over exposed picture than it is to pull up an underexposed one. Its a lot of trial and error, but over time, you get better.
Good luck,
Paul
yeah man, you’re totally right. I realized that when I imported all my first few years of photography into Aperture, that most everything I had shot up until then was shot underexposed, and it was pretty irritating to bring them all up to a more normalized level. I wish I had realized long ago to expose brighter instead.