Michael Freeman's Perfect Exposure

Book excerpt: Clear, direct and guaranteed, Perfect Exposure looks at the way professionals work, and lays out the decisions and sequences with absolute clarity, while incorporating the latest, powerful post-processing techniques. Choosing the exposure for a photograph is both alarmingly simple, and infinitely complex. Simple, because there is ultimately only one dosage of light, controlled as it always has been, by a shutter speed, aperture and ISO setting. But arriving at the perfect exposure is also complex, because it affects everything in the image and its effect on the viewer. There are endless subtleties in the brightness, readability and mood of every part of every scene, as the myriad of exposure decisions photographers take testifies. Understanding how and why exposure works is essential, not only because it helps you to decide what is instinctively "right". Perfect Exposure enables total confidence in that decision - an invaluable skill for every single photographer.