Hi Genie In A Lightbox, may you elaborate a bit more on what you meant by "overexposed the frame by 0.7 stop to reproduce the actual tone of the leaf on my picture"?
Manu Thanks.
P.S. Yup, through 2 speedlights.
Hi lunas
I'm not a technical person but I'll try to explain as best as I can. I learned this from John Shaw's books. You can browse his book on nature photography at Borders or Kinokuniya.
If you have shot slides before on film camera, the exposure latitude is about 5 stops - from white out to black out so to speak. For digital cameras, it can be more but you got to test it out yourself.
DPreview website tests out the exposure latitude for some cameras that they had a full review of.
Our camera meter meters our subject and expose it as middle tone. If you open one stop from metered value, green becomes light green on your picture. Open up two stops, green becomes pale green. Open up 3 stops, green becomes white. If you stop down one stop from metered value, green becomes dark green. Stop down two stops, green becomes very dark green. Stop down three stops, you get black. For all colours, we can apply the same principle. If your DSLR has 1/3 stop graduation, you get finer tonal controls. When in doubt, I will do bracketing and select the one I like later on.
The purpose of opening up or stopping down from metered value is to allow me to get the exact colour tone of the subject on the picture as it appears in real life. If the leaf is light green, I want it to appear light green in my picture. If the petal is dark purple, I want it to be dark purple in my picture. I carried over this habit of tone control from film camera. It works for me though. But remember we got to deal with WB on DSLR and this affects colour reproduction as well.
Hope you understand my explanation. I'll have to add a disclaimer that I'm no guru in digital photography. What works for me may or may not work for you. I'm trying out methods to understand my camera and lens better each day.
Add-on
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If you compare pictures #4 and #9 of the purple orchid, you should see the different tones of purple. #4 is the actual tone because it is middle tone in real life so I do not have to alter the exposure settings to reproduce the colour tone. For #9, I stopped down because I wanted the background to be black to make the purple stand out in the picture - of course, this rendered the petals dark purple. For this instance, the asthetics of the picture was more important to me than the colour reproduction. So it all depends on what you want.
Cheers!
