Measuring Exposure, Part Two - Scene Five

Betting Shop - Birmingham New Street Station

Best Exposure

26mm, f/4, 1/50, ISO 800

Exposure Compensation: +0.67

This subject of this image is the bright betting shop sign, with the floods of commuters passing by. The scene is located just outside of Birmingham New Street station, and is partially enclosed (just out of the left of the frame is open, where sunlight can enter). I liked this exposure the best, as the sign isn't washed out, but you can still see details on the pedestrians and the reflections on the ceiling are still nice and bright.

26mm, f/4, 1/80, ISO 800

Exposure Compensation: 0

This image was taken with the light-meter's recommended settings. It's ok actually, but the man in the foreground's face is cast in shadow, and the BETFRED lettering isn't quite as white. I expect this is due to the camera trying to achieve 18% grey.

26mm, f/4, 1/50, ISO 800

Exposure Compensation: +0.33

I can't see any perceptible difference between this image and my 'best exposure' image. I think I chose the other image due to a better arrangement of people within the frame, rather than for exposure reasons.

26mm, f/4, 1/100, ISO 800

Exposure Compensation: -0.67

This is the darkest image of the series, and looks like it could have been taken at night-time. The outlines of the people are now almost silhouette, and the white of the signage is nowhere near as bright. An acceptable image if I wanted to turn this day scene into a night scene, as its not clear from the image itself that natural light is entering from the left of the frame.

26mm, f/4, 1/80, ISO 800

Exposure Compensation: -0.33

This image appears very similar to the default exposure settings image, the main difference being the brightness in the reflections on the shop window.

Overall Response

Similar to the first series of images produced for this part of the project, exposure can be adjusted to give an impression that the time of day is different to what it actually is. Also, the prominent white of the shop sign has to be taken into consideration if you want your whites to be bright.

As a side note, I learnt a new Photoshop technique that I used with this series of images. As mentioned in another post, I had to manually change the exposure compensation to get the five images required, and this meant that the five images weren't exactly lined up. In these betting shop images it was a particularly obvious problem, probably due to the strong diagonal lines running across the image. I found out that Photoshop was capable of perfectly lining up all the images together, which is what I did here. I'll record the procedure and how I found about it under a new section of this blog - 'Photoshop Techniques'.