Exposure Compensation in Wildlife Photography

Exposing your images correctly should be one of the goals of every photographer.

In wildlife photography this means creating images that reflect the real scene you were faced with.  You might have done everything correctly but there is still one problem – your camera’s metering system cannot think.

Regardless of what you are photographing, no matter how light or dark your subject is your camera will attempt to expose the scene based on middle gray.

As a general guideline, middle gray refers to the tone that is perceptually between white and black and in photography is defined as 18% reflectance in visible light.

What does this mean?

If you are photographing a scene in which the tones are pretty evenly spread between black and white you camera will do a pretty good job in calculating the exposure leaving you with a well exposed, realistic image.  The problem is that when you are photographing subjects that are lighter or darker than middle gray they will also be rendered as middle gray in the image leaving them either too light or too dark.

Look at the following two examples.

The image on the left is how the camera’s autoexposure system ‘saw’ the buffalo.  Nice, but in real life the buffalo was not quite this light.  This is the result of the buffalo being a lot darker than the average tones (middle gray) in the image and therefore the camera exposed the animal’s dark fur lighter, closer to middle gray.

The image on the right is closer to the buffalo’s actual color and what we saw in the field.

In order for me to photograph the buffalo and reflect it’s real color and tones I had to use the exposure compensation function on my camera.

By using the exposure compensation button I was able to dial in a -1 under exposure, thereby darkening the buffalo in my image.

To compensate for the exposure you simply hold the button shown above and then roll the scroll wheel.  As you so this you will see the exposure meter on your camera (or in the viewfinder) move either up or down, showing you whether you are overexposing or underexposing and by how much.

This is the resulting image.

Buffalo

Nikon D300, Nikon 80-200 @ 200mm, 1/320, f/3.2, ISO 200, -1 stop exposure compensation

It might not seem like a huge difference but, as with everything in life, the devil is in the detail.  Regardless of whether you shoot in aperture, shutter speed or manual mode, exposure compensation is something that can, when used correctly, take your wildlife photographs one step up from good to better.

In time you will get better at knowing how much to over or underexpose by but in the meantime here are some guidelines to get you started when you next head out into the field.  Simply decide what your subject is, where it fits onto the following list and dial in your desired exposure compensation from there.

Exposure Compensation:  -2 to -1.3
Black hair, wet elephant, wet rhino, black feathers, dark / wet bushes.

Exposure Compensation:  -1 to -0.3
Dark fur, brown fur, rhino, elephant, dark feathers, green shrubs.

Exposure Compensation:  0
Mid-toned animals (lion, impala, kudu), old wood, dusty roads.

Exposure Compensation:  +0.3 to +1
Light fur, light feathers, overcast sky.

Exposure Compensation: +1.3 to +2
White feathers, fresh snow.

So there you go.  A quick, basic rundown on how you can use exposure compensation to create better wildlife photographs.  If you have any questions please fire away!

Tomorrow is guest post Thursday so, all going well, I am very happy to welcome back young up-and-coming award winning photographer Morkel Erasmus. You can check out Morkel’s previous guest post here but make sure to pop in and join Morkel tomorrow as he takes us on a photographic journey to the space, sand, silence and serenity of  the Kgalagadi.  You don’t want to miss this one!

I’ll see you on Friday!

Gerry