Make That Digital Camera

Trying to get the exposure right when shooting in bright sunlight or poorly lit subjects can be a frustrating experience. In one, you end up with burned out highlights and thick, black shadows hiding detail. In the other, lack of contrast or a faded look will also hide detail. Either way, you end up with an unatractive photograph no one wants to look at.

Careful metering is the order of the day, but there is a little known accessory that will transform you photography in difficult light conditions.

This has got to be one of the least expensive but most cost effective pieces of camera gear you're ever likely to own. It's called the 18% Grey Card. It is little more than a piece of card, coloured grey, that will reflect 18% of the light landing on it.

Suppose you wish to shoot a colourful flower bed on a bright, sunny day. The wide range of colors along with shade beneath the flowers might well fool many metering systems because they will each reflect different amounts of light. Place the grey card alongside the flowers, get your camera or light meter close to it and take your reading. This will give you exposure settings that will cope with the 18% reflected light and will produce and evenly exposed image.

This will usually produce a better, more evenly exposed image than letting the meter try to average out everything from across the whole scene.

The card can also be usefull when shooting a portrait or group of people even in normaly lit conditions. Holding the card close to a face and reading from that will ensure that you get perfect skin tones no matter what is in the rest of the scene.

Many tricky lighting conditions can be helped by using a grey card. It's well worth investing some small change in one and learning how to use it.

Mini Review

Paint Shop Pro X

This is the first release of Paint Shop Pro since Corel bought Jasc Software, and it continues to prove that excellent, powerful and easy to use graphics software does not need to cost a fortune.

Currently only £59.99 at Amazon, this really is a snip.

I've been using Paint Shop Pro as my main graphics tool for both photography and web development since version 4. Although I have tried many others, including Photoshop and Fireworks, I still keep coming back.

I will be posting a more in-depth review and a series of tutorials and how-to's during Feb, in the meantime click here to check it out, you really won't regret it!