Winter is almost over. It’s time to think about sun and sand. Maybe you are planning on taking the family to the beach and maybe you want to take a memory card full of photos with the new digital camera you got for Christmas.

The Problem:

Highly reflective beach scenes are a problem for most photographers unless they know how to compensate for their camera’s automatic meter settings. Have you ever taken a winter scene and had your print ruined by a blue tinge? Or have you ever shot the family at the beach only to have the people appear dark against the bright sand or water?

Most modern cameras, whether film or digital, have internal light meters. These light meters are preset at the factory to meter for the most common photographs that the average camera owner is expected to take. The key word here is “average”: shots taken at a family picnic; a birthday party; or a child’s soccer match, for example. Beach scenes and snow scenes are not average.

In order to properly capture an “average” scene, internal light meters are set to expose something “white’ to approximately 18% gray. (Each manufacturer is slightly different, but they all come in around 18% gray.) The reason the manufacturers have chosen 18% gray as their median has a lot to do with the early pioneers of photography, especially Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Weston designed the light meter that Ansel Adams used. It was preset to 18% gray.

In his books THE NEGATIVE and THE PRINT, Adams noted that the color “white” was achieved by blocking light to the paper in the printing process. Therefore, pure white was nothing more than an unexposed section of the white photo paper. It was a blank space, devoid of texture or information. For information to print in a “white” area, that area couldn’t be bright white. Any information that printed in the “white” space turned the paper slightly gray. Any perception of brightness is caused by a juxtaposition of darker shades. Something gray looks much “whiter” if it is placed next to something dark.

Manufacturers of light meters used Weston’s 18% gray as a standand. By itself, 18% gray is a fairly flat color. But when placed amid other colors, it appears far whiter than it really is.

In his book, THE PRINT, Adams performed an interesting experiment using the Weston meter. He took a white horse and a black horse. First he metered and photographed each separately and then metered and photographed them together. When he metered the white horse and photographed it alone, the horse came out looking 18% gray, not white. When he metered the black horse and photographed it alone, it, too came out 18% gray, not black. Both horses appeared to be the same color in a photographic print because of the preset values of the camera’s light meter. However, when he put the horses side by side and metered and photographed them together, they came out looking as you would expect them to look because the meter had averaged out their color.

Recognizing this inherent error for the meter to meter at the extremes of the light and dark scale, Adams created the Zone System in which the photographer, as the artist, choose exactly where he wanted the intensity of light and dark to fall.

What makes Adams’ work so stunning is his artistic manipulation of what he saw. Don’t be fooled by the seeming clarity and contrast of Adams’ spectacular photographs. He was a master manipulator: manipulating light to the negative by the use of color and neutral density filters and the Zone System; manipulating light to the paper by burning and dodging during the printing process; and finally manipulating the paper itself by immersing it in intensifying emulsions such as selenium.

The Solution:

All photography is a function of light and time, whether you are trying to capture a scene on film or on pixels. When taking beach photos, you must first recognize that the camera’s internal meter is giving you false reading. Sand is much brighter than the 18% gray that the meter is trying to reduce it to. So the first thing you have to do is to ignore what the camera is telling you. If you are using film or one of the more advanced digital cameras, you have to over-expose your shot by one, two, or even three stops depending on the intensity of the brightness of the scene.

Sports photographers find themselves in this kind of predicament quite often especially when dealing with teams that are wearing off-setting light and dark jerseys. Too many dark jerseys in a frame will over-expose the photograph. Likewise, too many light jerseys in the frame will under-expose the photograph.

Many sports photographers use a form of the Zone System to resolve this dilemma. They have discovered that if they meter for the grass in a stadium their photographs will come out. In Black and White, the green of the grass is rendered as 18% gray. If the grass is properly rendered, then everything else ON the grass will be rendered in its proper shade and brightness regardless of what the internal meter in the camera is saying. Sports photographers have learned that if they get one element in their photographs right, then all the other elements will fall into their proper place.

Similarly, while using color film, many outdoor photographers have found that if they meter for the northern, blue sky, everything else will be rendered correctly in their photographs. If the color saturation of the sky is correct in their photograph, all the other colors will be correct.

Digital Cameras:

Digital cameras offer you a wide range of options to compensate for bright scenes. On “Aperture Priority” setting, you must physically open the iris of the lens to allow more light to strike the sensor. If the camera is on “Shutter Priority”, you must physically allow for more TIME to allow the light to strike the sensor. Or if the camera has internal compensations, you must turn to the “special scene” adjustment and physically set the camera to the individual “snow” or “beach” settings. In the “snow” or “beach” settings, the camera automatically over exposes the picture.

As automatic as cameras seem nowadays, they are still machines and need to be told what to do. When you, as the photographer, don’t do anything to the camera’s settings, you are basically telling the camera to use its internal presets to take an “average” photograph. 90% of the time, you will take great pictures. However, for that 10% of the time when you are in “abnormal” settings, you will need to know how to instruct your camera to compensate. Beach scenes are abnormal because of the intensity and brightness of the light reflecting off the light/bright surfaces. By making the proper adjustments to your camera, or by metering for the sky, your photographs will come out looking beautiful.