 How's it? How's it? Today we're looking at exposures. And what is a correct exposure? Well, if you ask 10 different photographers, you're going to get probably 10 different answers. A lot of those answers are going to be somewhere around talking about the zone system, about having, you know, a wide range of detail within your negative that you can use, you know, later on, if needs be, when you are dodging and burning and making the final print, either in a, you know, wet dark on a computer, but I find that's a limiting way of thinking about exposures. And yes, it is helpful when you are a beginner to know what a good base exposure is. And a base exposure is basically what the light meter is giving you. So if you're using one of these, this is an internet light meter, it's going to reduce everything that's hidden in this little MacGuffity thing here into a range of gray in this thing, you know, sort of mid gray tone. And that's what your light meter is doing in your camera as well, that is giving you an average of the scene in front of you. But we don't always want average. There's nothing wrong with going and deciding that the scene in front of you doesn't necessarily have to have all the detail within it, just in case you need it later on to save the image. And this is why you should shoot raw so you can, you know, fix any problems later on. But when you are confident with how exposure works and when you have that base exposure that you can then go off-piste with it a little bit, you can make the image contrastier if you want to. You can make it flatter if you wanted to. You can do all sorts of things because no longer are you a slave to the, you know, the electronic thing. And this is, of course, also electronic and so is the camera, you know, the meter inside your camera and they're making decisions for you. This is not going to be the correct exposure. It's going to be the right starting point. But this doesn't know what I want to create from the image. Sometimes I want all this, you know, shadow detail. And sometimes I want the image to be a little bit more dramatic to feel a little bit more like it's less of just an average thing. And we can see that's the word average has come up again. A correct exposure is often, I think, mistaken for a average exposure. And I don't know about you, but I don't want my photographs to be average. I want them to be as best as I can possibly be. So rather than getting hung up on what is the correct exposure, understand that so long as you get a proper starting point that you can then manipulate that to give you the effects that you want. And if you are looking to sort of free yourself a little bit from, you know, the inbuilt camera meters, either you can buy something like this. This is a Sconic FlashMate L308S, which I used to use in the studio. Or you can go slightly cheaper option and get yourself an 18% gray card. So this will help you also with your white balances. So, you know, double win there. But it's going to take you off being reliant on something else, doing the thinking for you. I want to all of these these episodes, all of these talking about, you know, the five minute photo score is not to give you a roadmap specifically to say, look, you must go this direction. You must do this. And this is how you get there. These are prompts to get you to start being confident about being out there in the wilds and stuff when you're out taking photographs to find your own answers, to find your own path through that jungle of photography because you are then confident that you're understanding how things work rather than saying you need to go from point A to point B. I know you can do it. Even if you have been, you know, shooting on on P for professional, you know, aperture priority or shutter priority, whichever one or, you know, you have never even thought about exposures is to take the plunge, to find that base exposure, to think about how when you change an f-stop, does that change the exposure? But if you want to keep the exposure the same, you know, you then need to move the shutter speed in different ways. So everything kind of just links together. And if you are interested in finding out a bit more about the zone system, because it is actually a very useful system to help you get to grips with the idea of, you know, exposure and good base exposures, then I have put together a video about Ansel Adams and this very wonderful way of taking your print and black and white print and taking them from this kind of grey, splodgy, blemage kind of feel to these wonderful sumptuous, awesome looking black and white prints, which I know that you would love to put upon the wall. Click on the video over here and I will see you again soon. Thanks for watching.