Exercise Histograms

Having completed the first two exercises and looked at the histogram exercise I have decided to have a break from it until after Christmas as with everything else going on and it being a tricky subject to get my head around completely might not be able to put the amount of time into it as I would like, although having said that I have read through the exercise and if the opportunity crops up I will take the shots but I won't be going out especially to take them.

Well Christmas is over I have had a rather large birthday and its time to get back to work, I have had many attempts at this exercise  and although I am still not completely happy with the images I do understand the importance of a correctly exposed histogram,

The first one is the low contrast one I thought this would be fairly easy to do all I needed was a scene with little tonal change that was my first mistake, I took many photographs checked the histogram on the back of the camera and deleted them, finally starting t o get a bit despondent I decided to photograph fence panels not exactly exciting I know but it was the results I was mostly interested in.
below is the histogram taken from the metered reading

This was quite strange in that the histogram on the back of the camera showed all three colours together where the red is on this histogram but the colours are correct in relation to the actual colour of the fence.

Photograph two is + 1 stop and the histogram looks much more like the one on the back of the camera but the colour is wrong, detailing is also lost.

Photograph three is - 1 stop and this time the colour is much darker the histogram is much closer together and more detail is shown.

On all three photographs there was no clipped highlights.

Average contrast

The metered shows there is more of the photograph in shadow but there are no clipped highlights on the photograph and no shadow highlights either.

The next shot is one stop lighter this time there is quite a bit of clipped highlights and a small amount of shadow clipping. How ever the histogram looks more evenly spread but the image is not true to the day.

The final image is 1 stop darker there is plenty of shadow clipping and the histogram is mainly to the shadow side, I quite like this shot, although I would have liked slightly more detail to it maybe it would be worth dialling in 1/3 stop from the metered one.

Finally the high contrast shot.
I was surprised how difficult this was to shoot, but trying to get the right conditions in the winter when its been really gloomy and hardly any sun was interesting to say the least. I finally decided to try and set something up in side.

I used a white glass and a black beaded arrangement hoping that because of the contrast in the two colours ie both ends of the histogram I might get something useful from it, the first one shows no clipped highlights at all although you can see that the main part of the histogram was to the right hand side. Pattern is reasonable clear and fairly like the original work.

Photograph two which is one stop lighter, this time you can see the clipped highlights area although I would have expected to see this slightly larger, the detail of the glass has almost disappeared.

Photograph three taken one stop darker and this is the most like the original set up, the glass can be seen clearly there are no clipped highlights, probably the best of the three shoots.

I am glad to finish this exercise not because I didn't understand it or don't appreciate the importance of a correctly exposed histogram but more because of frustration with weather conditions and not getting a bright day which would have helped with the high contrast photographs and when we did get a bright day I was in my day job.