A Little More Time
With exposure it’s amazing what a small amount of time can do for a photo, not only does it give the ability to smooth out water to get that silky look, enable the capture of motion in like in waterfalls and star trails or even to hide something that didn’t stay still. I recently adjusted the time when shooting the crescent moon by changing the exposure compensation dial.
This extra time also enables more light the be gathered so you can see things you just cannot with your eyes. Take the two photos below captured hand held with a 14-150mm on an Olympus OM-D EM1 MKII body with only a flick of the exposure compensation dial (yes I was shooting in Aperture Priority) the end result is night and day.
Yes the extra little bit of zoom would make the left one darker as the light source was brighter whilst in Aperture Priority mode but not by much.
Exposure can be adjusted in post and you can get away with a fair bit when working with RAW files but to add more light means adding noise especially in the dark areas of the frame, it’s always best to try and get as close to the end result in camera or to a level in RAW that you know you can enhance in post.
Normally I shoot low light in Manual mode but I can get away with a lot in Aperture Priority mode. In this case by not changing to Manual mode (me being lazy) the camera aimed for an ‘even’ exposure that meant that it had to increase the shutter time (ISO and Aperture locked) which was longer than I would have done if shooting in Manual as the light I could see with my eyes was somewhere in between the two photos above.
This capture was the night before the two at the start. Again from memory I was shooting in Aperture Priority mode with high ISO that was able to capture more of the light after the sun had set, I do love the shape the moon took on when focus was pulled to a small branch of a plant that was nearby.