Why are all my pictures so bright?

Lately you may (or may not) have noticed my pictures are extremely bright. You may be asking your self, "I thought Michelle was taking photography lessons?" Well to answer your inner thoughts, I am taking lessons! My photos may appear to be getting worse not better but that is simply because I am implementing some things I am learning and do not have the proper computer soft ware to work on my images after taking them. I hope to be getting the soft ware soon, but for now its just to expensive.

So what is it I am doing to my images? Well when I take pictures now I am purposely over exposing them, just enough. I have recently learned about the grey scale and the histogram on my camera. Understanding shades of grey has allowed me to better understand how pictures are formed. Then when I learned what a histogram on my camera is and how it works I was able to start taking better pictures. Well pictures that will appear better after I work on them in the digital dark room (once I get my hands on this program!)

Humm, how do I even begin to explain the histogram? http://www.livingroom.org.au/photolog/tips/histogram_tips.php Ok just click on that link, it will take you to the webs ten best histogram sites. But what I was taught that you may or may not get from these sites is this, and listen up close because this will change your life in photography from here on out. The histogram has several columns,all the columns equal one hundred percent of your picture. But the histogram is not visually divided equally. The very last column on your histogram equals 50...yes FIFTY percent of your pictures lighting data! The first several columns combined equal the other fifty percent.

So when you take a picture (now get your camera set up, so that you see your histogram with every picture you take!) you must make sure that some of the data is read on that very last column on your histogram. Other wise you have lost 50...yes FIFTY percent of your data.

By over exposing your pictures just enough you will push your histogram to the right and now you have 100 percent of your pictures data to work with in the digital dark room.

It took me 3...yes three hours to learn this (complete with pictures, drawings and hand on work.) All under the guidance of a professional. Not because I am slow (well that may be part of it, lol) but because as he put it, this is the most important bit of information that a photographer can learn. So if I have royally confused you in the ten minutes it has taken me to type this, please don't give up. Just do some more research and learn how to use your histogram and learn to push it to the right.

As soon as I get my computer soft ware I will post before and after pictures to show the effects of all this.