The Power of Underexposing on Purpose

You've been taught to fear the dark frame. Check the histogram, brighten it up, protect the shadows — that's the rule, right? Except some of the most striking, memorable photographs ever taken broke that rule deliberately.

In this episode, we unpack why "correct" exposure and interesting exposure aren't always the same thing. We'll cover where the fear of underexposing actually comes from, what happens to a photo psychologically and visually when you let the shadows win, and exactly how to meter and shoot with intention instead of accident. Plus: where this technique shines, and where it can work against you.

If you've ever wondered why some photos feel quiet and powerful while others just feel flat, this one's for you.

Sometimes the most powerful photo is the one where you show the least.

It's time for another podcast...

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

One of the instincts that most beginner photographers have is to worry about having a shot that's too dark. And what they'll tend to do if the image looks too dark, they'll push up the exposure to fix it. And what I'm going to suggest and what I want to talk about in this podcast is that some of the most striking photographs have broken that rule on purpose. They are deliberately underexposed. And the reason I want to talk about this is that it adds another tool to your creative toolkit, if you like. And this goes beyond being, it's not really a technical trick, it is about creating images that are engaging, that stop you scrolling, however, you take your images. So I want to start with looking at where this fear of underexposure comes from. So typically what will happen is when you take a photograph, you take you have a look at your LCD screen, have a look at the histogram, and see a dark image. And the reflex is almost automatic to fix it. But all of that is to do with shooting a technically correct photograph, but it's not about shooting a photograph that is deliberately moody or deliberately sets up a particular emotion. And this is where the power of good photography really comes in because you can deliberately steer a photograph the way a photograph feels towards a certain emotion once you know what you're doing. So I've certainly had shots that were kind of they were quite dark, and I've tried to correct them up a little bit, and they and they lost some of that interest that drew me to them in the first place. So when I go through photographs, I tend to shoot a lot of photographs, so I don't um I don't even look at all of them. I'll have a look at um thumbnails, but then I'll kind of dive into a few and they're the ones I work with. So whatever grabbed my attention in the first place, I found that with some of them, by trying to correct the exposure if it's been off, it actually loses whatever it was that drew me to it in the first place. And you may well have had that experience of shooting something that seemed to be too dark, but when you tried to correct it, it just became flat. And a lot of this comes from exposed to the right. So if you've if you're familiar with that expression, obviously you know what it is. If you're not familiar with it, um basically it goes back to really the early days of digital photography. So digital sensors capture more usable data in the brighter parts of the image. So if you push the exposure to the right, which is the brighter part of the image, so I'm talking about the histogram that comes up. Technically, you'll preserve more detail and you'll have a lower noise in shadows. And this comes from the early days of digital where high ISO noise was a much, much bigger problem than it is with modern cameras. So that's one area where they've got a lot better. And unfortunately, though, it's become it's like photography orthodoxy, it's repeated in tutorials, camera manuals, YouTube videos, whatever. So it's moved from being a tip, a technical tip to just overcome shortcomings of the technology at the time, to being a creative rule. And while I'm keen on rules, because they give you guidance, they help you to structure, they help you to shoot on the whole better photographs. It's really important as well that they they're not rules that you need to adhere to the whole time. So I'm a big one for breaking rules, but knowingly breaking them. And this is one that I definitely suggest you think about breaking. So what happens when you just apply this rule blindly when you just constantly um expose to the right? Um, what you get is every photograph, they'll look evenly lit, they'll look evenly exposed, and they'll be quite safe. And they're technically correct, but they can also be pretty unforgettable. And this again comes back to um something that I've spoken about often actually, and that's put two photographers together, same scene, um, same camera, and they'll shoot something differently, uh, something different. And this is one of the point cases in point when you're exposing to the right. So if you start ignoring that and deliberately letting images become darker, what you start to do is build up a sense of mystery. Um, you you don't need to see every leaf, you don't need to see the detail of every brick or whatever it is, wherever it is you're shooting. You can let those elements of the photograph start to set the scene. So, one of the important things about photography is that you'll have a subject, um, or my opinion, you're welcome to argue, you'll have a subject, and the other elements, so the other points of interest in the photograph, are really there to support the subject, they're to help tell the story or to convey some sort of a mood, some sort of a feeling. So, some of the most powerful images I've seen are actually pretty dark, they're underexposed, but you get one area, it might be um a shaft of light and a single animal's eye being visible, something like that. But that image is full of tension, it's full of mystery, it's something that it will arrest you rather than a perfectly exposed uh picture of an animal's face, for example, where you can see everything. It's nice, uh, maybe it looks nice on the wall, but it's pretty boring in the end. So it's important not to confuse having a technical target, which is what correct exposure is, with being creative. So an interesting exposure is a creative decision. So I definitely recommend that you learn to shoot technically correct images because that's um an important skill. These are foundational skills. But once you've started to master that, begin to vary them, start to play with underexposing. Obviously, overexposing is another uh another creative option that you have. But if you deliberately under or overexpose an image, what happens? Uh, what changes with the feel of the image? What how do you relate to the subject when you look at that image? And this is where it starts to get interesting because what you're essentially doing is deliberately breaking a rule that you were taught, but you know which rule you're breaking. And the reason for doing that, the reason that that's important is it means you can start to recreate that feel, that kind of image, and that in turn becomes part of your style. And I spoke about style um a few podcasts ago now. But that's something that, although you might not get into photography thinking I need to have a style and I need it now, um, it is something that will tend to develop and it sort of happens on its own. And style can be as simple as just images that you like, but as you start to push the boundaries a little bit and you start to experiment, you'll find that you start to create images that maybe you didn't even think you could have shot maybe a year before. So this is an important thing to play with. It's it and you know, it is about play, it's being creative. So I want to talk about what underexposing does to a photograph, and that's both visually and also psychologically. So the idea of this podcast isn't to be heavily psychological, but as I said earlier, the most powerful photographs have an emotional content to them, or they elicit an emotional response from the person looking at them. And if you can start to master that and not and make it something that doesn't just happen by accident, then you can start shooting amazing images. So first thing to think about, and I'm gonna look at this for um from three angles here. So the first one is mood and mystery. So what shadow hides can be often much more powerful than what it is reveals, and the reason for that is that we are natural storytellers. So if you haven't heard me talk about this before, well, even if you have, uh I talk about the visual storyteller. We love storytelling. Human beings have been loving stories since we evolved. Even if you go back to old cave paintings, things like that, you can imagine people back then sitting around a campfire telling stories, maybe the pictures on the wall help to support the stories. Um, more recently, um, think of the popularity of uh what happened with the printing press and how people love books, think of movies, TV series now, all that kind of stuff. So we love stories. And what will happen is if we're not provided with the full story visually in a photograph, we'll start to make things up. And this is the power of shooting in a way that not everything is revealed, and in a way that there you suggest a certain thing uh with an image, but you don't fill in the gaps, you let the person looking at the image fill in the gaps. So I hope this is making sense. Um but if if it if it isn't, uh just try it. Um take a few pictures of a subject, but deliberately underexpose it and even tweak it in post and look at how underexposed you can get it, how dark you can get it, think about highlights. What's the subject if it's um a living thing with an eye, uh uh focus on the eye, and if that can be lit, then how does the image change as you darken the rest of the animal? Um what what does that image feel like? Uh, is there a different emotional response to it? So mood and mystery are a really important factor in exposure, and it's well, from what I've seen, people tend to focus more on getting it right than thinking about how it's interpreted by the viewer. Now, another way of using it's exposure in this way is to isolate the subject. So, as I've said, a single-lit eye or a rim-lit silhouette or a glint of a glint of light on fur fur or on a feather, all of these are pretty cool images. So they can be the kind of image that you just want to the sort of thing you can look at for a long time actually and repeatedly go back to it, and there's still in a way, you still you see more there, but only it's only because your mind is um creating more of a story about it. But if you think about those examples, they are powerful images, particularly if you've got an eye um that is just lit and maybe a part of the face, uh, that's something that and the rest of it is quite dark, that will just rivet your eye to the the eye that you're looking at and um see what happens from there. You know, that there's a real emotional feel to it. So isolating the subject is important, and then contrast and drama. So where you have deep shadows, where you have dark areas, they tend to emphasize the areas that are lit. It makes those areas feel much more important. So maybe some images have come to mind while I've been speaking. If not, um I definitely recommend you just have a hunt for a few things um on the internet wherever you find your images and um uh find something like that just to give you further ideas. But the thing to do with that is to then just look at those images and work out how they were shot, and underexposure is likely to be um a part of it. So, how do you do it deliberately? Um so this comes down to your metering choices. So, yes, you can definitely work on an image in post, but I'm a big believer in getting as much as I can right before I press the shutter button, and then using for me, post-processing is kind of a tidy up. But if you're shooting raw, if you shot it correctly, it's correctly exposed. Uh, it will be a bit flat. So these days with digital, you you really have to be post-processing the important pictures. I don't think there's um unless you get incredibly lucky, but um, if you've done everything correctly, um a well-exposed raw file will generally be a bit flat, so you need to just correct it in post. So do what you can before you get that far. And metering is really important, and what I suggest is that you use spot metering if you're not already using it. So um, if you don't understand what I'm talking about, uh the camera it has an exposure meter built in essentially, or what older photographers like me would call an exposure meter. But the way it works is set using the menu these days, somewhere, and you can do basically have a setting, and what these are called will vary from camera to camera. So I'm gonna be only going to talk about these very generally, and you'll need to, if you want to find out more, have a look at how your camera's set up. But there are different sizes of or different um proportions of the frame are used to get the lighting. So the broadest um way that a camera will sort out exposure is to work over most of the frame, so most of what you can see through the viewfinder, it will take the average of that lighting, uh, it's actually a grayscale that it uses, and it will then expose against, so in other words, it will set uh the aperture or the shutter speed or whatever it's got control of to get the correct exposure against that average meting, uh meter reading it's taking across that area of the photograph. So if that's a large area and you've got areas of dark and light, um chances are you've got you'll get something that's sort of okay, probably. Um it depends on the picture itself that you're taking. But if you're looking at an average over large area, particularly if you've got different areas of quite bright areas and then quite dark areas, average by definition is not going to expose pretty much anything correctly. It's gonna be somewhere where it needs to be so that as much of the image as possible is correctly lit. So I'm sort of talking extremes here. What it's fair to say is that for general photography, that's okay. If you're just doing snapshots, if you're not particularly bothered about the outcome, you just want nice photographs of people and you just work in auto, that's pretty much what you're going to be using. So that's what the camera does. No, no, and it's fine. Like I say, for a lot of stuff, it's fine. However, once you start getting a bit more creative, and if you are shooting in tricky environments, which as a wildlife photographer is something I often find myself doing, and what I mean by that is area, so forest, think of this forest that's got a lot of tree cover. You can have very bright sunlight above, not much bright sunlight gets all the way through the trees and the leaves and all of that stuff, but you might have gaps in the trees. You get these areas, sometimes just lines of bright light coming through from above through the gaps in the trees. So for anything walking or moving on the ground, and here I'm thinking of a tiger, in fact, gorillas as well. When I went to see gorillas, I had the same situation. Gorillas actually were worse because they they're dark furred, so and their faces are dark as well. So you've pretty much got a black subject or a very dark subject in a very interesting lighting environment. So you really want to, in that instance, start exposing to what we call the highlights, in other words, the bright areas, and excuse me, that that's the area that you want to have correctly exposed. Because if that's the animal's face or its eye, um, in the case of a tiger, if you've got the light on the eye, the kind of orange and its lovely colour, cheetahs as well, actually, uh, you really want the eye correctly exposed, and also because when we're looking at portraits, we connect with other animals, people, whatever through the eye. So that wants to be correctly exposed, and then you can work with you know what the rest of it does is what the rest of it does, and you can tweak that as you need to. So, spot metering, rather than using the whole of the frame or a large proportion of the frame to work out an average, it just uses one or two, or really, in fact, the the the way I use it, I use the central um area in the so the area spot in the center of the frame. Uh, you can with some cameras you can change where that is, but just to keep it simple, um, we'll look at a spot in the center of the frame. I push the shutter halfway down, that sets my exposure. Now, what I can do is a lot of cameras have um AE lock, so it's an exposure lock button, often at the back of the camera, which you can press with your thumb. So I'll press that down and hold it, and then I can let go of the shutter and I can just move the camera around and reframe. So, what that button does, it just holds that exposure level, that reading that I got off the animal's eye, and it will then expose the next shot at that exposure uh reading, that exposure level. So that means that I can set my exposure where I want it to be, then reframe, recompose the image and then shoot, and that's then giving me that um contrast between a bright area, but it's it's this subject, it's the primary point of interest in my image, and I want that perfectly exposed, and then everything else kind of adds to the story, and then I can tweak all of that in pose. So that that's metering, and if you don't know much about metering, I do recommend that you learn a little bit more about it. Um, you can use uh manual exposure compensation, so you can deliberately dial it down. Um so what that is, often you'll have a little bar type thing, usually going from minus three to plus three with a zero in the middle, and there's a little indicator on it, and normally the indicator will be at zero. But what that does, it allows you to deliberately under or overexpose uh what you're the the automatic reading by up to plus three stops or minus three stops, and it's normally in thirds of a stop increment. And and when you set that um exposure compensation manually, that means that you are now deliberately underexposing against whatever the camera is going to uh set as the correct exposure for you. Um, I'm not really gonna go into that anymore in the podcast. Uh, I do talk about it a lot in my course actually. I'm talking about this about this podcast. So I do have a course called Discovery in DSLR and mirrorless photography. It assumes no knowledge. It's um I did it a few years ago now, but it's still very relevant. Uh, but it um obviously cameras have changed a little bit, but um the basics haven't. So I'll definitely I definitely go through things like that there. Okay, so what is what do you need to protect in the camera versus what do you want to lose, or what is it okay to lose when you're taking a shot? So, what I mean by all of that is when you're looking at a scene, what do you want to keep? What needs to be visible, and then what can you lose? So the situation I was talking about where, and this is perhaps where it's uh darker, where the the difference, the height dynamic range, the difference between the brightest part of the image and the darkest can be quite large, and maybe the brightest area is fairly small. I I would think about what detail I want to keep. Like I've said, if it's an eye, I want to be able to clearly see that eye. The more detail I've got on the eye, the better, because that's going to create a really strong connection between the viewer and the subject. And as I said, what happens with the rest of the frame? Kind of what happens, but that's the bit I'm Prepared to lose. Now, there might be aspects that are in the darker area that I want to still keep, so I can manage that in post as well to a degree, but it is better to try and do that as you shoot. So this is where you might want to use, for example, uh exposure compensation just to use your spot metering on the um the brightest part, and then exposure compensation will sort out how light or dark the rest of it is. So the the main tip I would have for you here, I'm aware that I'm talking about a lot, and there aren't any uh images to show you either at this point, so that doesn't probably help. But the important thing to remember here is to just when you're doing your metering where you're setting exposure, meter for your subject's brightest point, and then if the way to approach it is just to let everything else fall into shadow, let the rest of it go, and because that connection with your subject is the most important thing. Okay, so that is how to do it, um, or one way to do it, it's the main way, the way I'd recommend. And I just wanted to look at where it works. So the kind of situations where deliberately underexposing can be very helpful is certainly in low-life um wildlife, uh, where you're gonna have bright areas anyway. So rather than trying to get a beautifully evenly lit scene, it's probably a lot more productive to just focus on the highlights, use spot metering, focus on the highlight, and let the rest of it go into dark because you're likely to get a more moody uh and impactful image anyway. Uh, with portraits, uh, definitely um something to experiment with and experiment with the lighting, how you're using the background. Because if you've got a darker background or there's some detail in the background, but you've darkened it down, um, and I'm still talking about doing this through the viewfinder or through the um image on the back, if you're on a mirrorless um and not uh particularly with using masks and things in post-processing, that's another whole other thing that I'm I'm not going to talk about. But when you're doing portraits, again, if you have even a black background and you've just got the person's face, and and I remember pictures, I think they were taken in the 1920s, 1930s. These two of them were film stars where they were quite contrasted, the background would be very dark and the subject would be quite light, but they're very impactful images. Um, so again, how you use that is up to you, but it's um a good example of using that technique to just make more interesting portraits, portraits that have a bigger visual impact. Um, moody landscapes. So, again, just exposing for highlights, uh, you can create really good. This is where you get these moody landscapes that I actually saw somewhere recently I was watching something online, and someone was talking about how you get a you know, why do your photos look like this and photographer professional photographers look like that? Uh, the chances are that the really flat looking images, which was the kind of what everybody does, is probably because there's an even exposure going on. And if you change to um spot metering when you're setting exposure and set for a highlight, then other parts of the image are going to be much darker than they would be if you were using just your uh sort of um average metering across the uh the frame. So again, experiment with that if you're into landscapes, and then obviously backlit subjects, you can have great fun with them and really maybe work on the um silhouettes having a bright silhouette, a bright edge, and that can create a really interesting photograph. Maybe using um to golden out is a good one because you get that sort of golden glow around um a silhouette. Um so that's where you can use it. Where I suggest you don't use it, is when you are um if you're shooting things like uh or to document where you need accuracy. Um I'm thinking of a police photographer, you're probably not going for mood when you're going in and shooting crime scenes and things. So anything that needs to be documentary, then yeah, just use average metering across the frame and that will give you a reasonable exposure without too much work. Um, and another one is perhaps busy scenes where you don't have a clear focal point. So the point about using this um spot metering method and underexposing is it really draws your subject out. That's the the primary thing you're doing with it. But if you don't have a clear subject, uh a clear point of interest, then probably not worth doing. It might you you come back to the question of anybody looking at it thinking, well, okay, lovely, what am I supposed to be looking at here? Um the important thing to remember with this is that this is a personal choice. This uh is about a choice to suit your personal style. I am not suggesting universal rules here. I don't particularly uh um like universal rules. Um like I said, they're good as starting points, but um, or I've said in other podcasts, they're good as starting points if you're not really sure, but you want to develop your photography, so try different rules like rules of thirds for rules of the rule of thirds, for example, or the rule of threes, or all these other things that you can do. But do remember that you know how you adjust it in the end is completely up to you, and it's about developing photographs, it's about creating photographs that you really love and enjoy, and um that you you so it's this isn't about doing the checklist that we spoke about earlier when you're learning photography. Um the other thing is just to remember that if things are really underexposed, you may not be able to cover them, recover them later. So it this is why it becomes a deliberate choice. Okay, so um I've spoken through um I think most of the things I want to cover on this. Uh so I don't know if you have tried underexposing deliberately, but it's worth a or in fact overexposing deliberately as well. But I'm a big one for experimenting, so if you haven't tried it, I definitely recommend that you do. Um so the thing about this, and I'm gonna call it minimalism in low light, it's really about editing the scene before you press the shutter button. So it really is a question of being very, very deliberate about your subject and how much of the background you want to use and how much you want to draw that subject out of the background. Um, so the three key things here to remember are first of all, just meter the highlights. You spot metering and meter for the highlight. Embrace the shadow, let there be shadows there. Um, let that area be dark. Don't worry about a lot of the image, a lot of the frame, a lot of the picture being underexposed, or maybe even a lot of it may not even be that visible. Don't worry about it. What you're trying to do, or the intention part of it, is to isolate the subject and create mood. So I have a challenge uh if you would like to um to do it, just find one low light scene this week and intentionally underexpose it by a full stop and see what it does to the mood. So you you could even shoot it as like correct exposure, correct in um air quotes, um, and then shoot it underexposed by a full stop. So you can do that pretty easily with the exposure compensation on the camera if you found that. Um and that's pretty much it. See what it does to the mood. So I guess the final thought to leave you with on this one or this week is that sometimes the most powerful photograph is the one where you show the least. And if you haven't experimented, I recommend that you do. So I hope you found that useful. I hope I wasn't rambling too much. And um the next podcast will be available on Friday. So until then, goodbye.