Cover images © 2004 Bryan Peterson ; ISBN 0-8174-6300-3; 2004 Published by Amphoto Books

Bryan Peterson, a well known professional photographer and instructor, has provided beginners to photography with a method for understanding exposure — something he feels is crucial for expressing one’s creativity through the medium of photography. His method focuses on the ‘interrelationship’ between aperture, shutter speed and ISO which he refers to as the ‘photographic triangle.’ It is the author’s hope that by understanding this relationship, the photographer can then consistently make correct exposures under varying and challenging lighting conditions as well as creatively use an aperture, shutter speed or ISO setting to produce the desired results.

To set the tone, the author begins by giving a brief definition of exposure and then presenting an exercise for the student to manually set an exposure in-camera. He then gives a detailed explanation of his ‘photographic triangle,’ placing the camera light meter in the center of the triangle as the tool used to determine exposure.

Image © 2008 Richard Lovison ; Drawn to simulate the equivalent of Bryan Peterson’s Photographic Triangle

Peterson does a wonderful job in giving elaborate explanations of what an f-stop, shutter speed and ISO setting are and how they interrelate when it comes to determining exposure. He then presents the reader with a list of seven ‘creative exposure’ options based on combinations of aperture and shutter speed settings and provides beautiful images as examples of these options. With this knowledge, any beginner in photography can now think for her/himself rather than rely on the camera’s ‘intelligence’ to make decisions. The door to the individual’s creativity can now be opened.

In his chapter on light, Peterson writes something a bit controversial — he places the importance of light as the “frosting” on the cake but not “the cake” itself. That statement departs from what is currently floating around the photographic circles where light is thought of as the prime importance of the image. Most likely the latter got started with the utterance from a landscape photographer looking for an angle to sell. The quality of light can certainly enhance an image though the subject of the image and how it is presented along with the emotional response it invokes is of main importance.

The author goes on to describe the many types of lighting – front lighting, side lighting, back lighting, etc – and once again gives outstanding images as examples. He explains how a reflective light meter sees the world in neutral gray and how that can affect an exposure as well as offers instructions on how to determine an exposure by metering a photographic Gray Card. An explanation on the use of an incident light meter and how that differs from a reflective one would have been helpful if included.

Another added bonus was how Peterson defined his approach to metering the sky or metering off something green with a -2/3 stop adjustment to determine exposures in difficult lighting conditions. He ends his book with a chapter on special techniques that includes the use of Polarising and Neutral Density (ND) filters as well as the creative use of double exposures.

All in all, ‘Understanding Exposure’ is a wonderful book for the beginner in photography. The author achieves his objective of providing a method for understanding exposure and its creative applications by writing in a style that is clear, concise and easily understandable. The book is of high quality, printed on heavy stock in 8½”x 11” format with 150 remarkably well illustrated examples that support the author’s teachings. Even though it was originally written with the film photographer in mind, Peterson’s methods can be applied to digital photography as well.

Any beginner to photography will walk away with a strong foundation in the understanding of exposure and the creative options it offers after reading Peterson’s book. ‘Understanding Exposure’ deserves a 4.5 star rating.