2BD48 - Mango Light Play - Exposed to the Right

 

With a few tweaks to contrast and exposure brought it back to normal.

 As shot, intentionally over-exposed.

I've been trying to wrap my head around this concept all weekend.  Basically, the idea is to over-expose your shots because mid-tones and highlights hold more information via the sheer number of pixels than do the shadows. If you tend to take shadowy pictures, you're introducing more noise in the dark areas.   But I guess that also explains the difference between shooting raw and with jpgs.    RAW offers more data that you can tweak later.    So I took some pictures over exposed by 1 or 2 f-stops.  They looked pretty bad to me straight out of the camera.

Here's the screenshot from LightRoom.  The histogram on the right reflects the tweaks I made to pull back the exposure and even out the histogram.   All the red areas on the left side mark the clipping in the white (over-exposed) areas.

Hmmmh ...   I guess I'm not real impressed with this technique.  Maybe it would work better with another image / subject?  It seems like a lot of fuss an bother on the shooting side, just to make corrections in post production.  I'm just not used to, or comfortable shooting in manual mode.  By the time you have everything set up and ready to go, the shot is gone.  The bird has flown away ...  At this point, I much prefer auto mode.  I know that sounds like heresy to some people out there, but it does a pretty good job in most cases.

If you're wondering what this is a picture of, it's a mango in a pottery bowl with sunlight coming through our lace curtains to make some interesting light play.   I like how the shadows bent around the curves of the bowl and mango.    Just for fun, here are a few more Light Play pictures [For the record, I think these were all taken on manual  / auto mode] :