Very nice pictures, Don, and the colors are great. All three of them.
Mostly I end up being EV +/- 1 or 2 stops to get the right color. Sure, I could spot meter or use averaging or centering to get close but would rather use the histogram and the image preview to dial in the color. Mostly the histogram.
Are you saying you adjust to EV +/- 1 or 2 to get the histogram right, then alter exposure in post processing to get the colors the way you want? (Because after all, the picture that has the best histogram does not always look best in image preview)
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Jon, This may be hard to explain, but essentially if the histogram is right then the colors will be right. The EV adjustments I make are to get the colors right. I trust the histogram more than the preview screen. Now having said that, the histogram has to match the scene. Remember the meter in the camera will always strive to balance at middle gray tones. That's why the built in meter, if left to it's own, will make white snow gray and black cats gray. The only thing that the meter does extremely well is if the scene has a lot of tonal range or the majority of the scene is a middle tone. A landscape of trees, grass and blue sky works well for the meter since these are all middle tones. If the same scene has white clouds in the blue sky and dark shadows in the trees, the meter still does well because of the wide range of tones. But, replace the blue clouds with white sky and the grass with snow, the meter is going to expose them to be gray because the predominant tone is white and the meters job is to balance to gray. Simply put, for a dark scene the histogram should be left side oriented, for a light, bright scene it should be right side oriented, for a typical scene with lots of tone, it should be middle oriented with peaks in the center. Lots of colors or tones then the histogram band should be wide, and visa versa. Hope that makes sense. If not, John Shaw and Bryon Peterson do a wonderful job explaining exposure and metering in their books.
Now back to the flowers, and EV adjustments. In the Power Puff shot, the background was very dark and the powder puffs themselves were somewhat shaded. Thus, I knew the meter would overexpose the scene (make everything lighter than it should be) To compensate for that I used an EV -2/3. Remember I said the histogram has to match the scene, well in this case the histogram was left side oriented and in fact, clipped the background, which was ok in this case because I wanted the background to go black. Without compensating this way, the background would have been lighter and the flower and berries would have been pink and the whole shot would have looked washed out.
The Shooting Star is going to seem like a contradiction, but it's really not. In this case, the woods were relatively dark and the flower is a light lavender. So, based on what I just said, the meter would have naturally lightened the scene. But in this case, not enough. The EV +2/3rds was needed to get enough bars to the right of the histogram that I felt confident the flower was exposed correctly. And even with this adjustment, I could have gotten away with a little more to brighten some of the white areas of the flower.
As a matter of practice, I do generally bracket my shots at +1 and -1 to hedge my bet and this is a practice I would recommend for everyone. With some frequency, I'll shoot a scene thinking the EV should be +/- some value and get home and discover I'm not so smart. Bracketing gives me some latitude in these cases. Certainly, with RAW files you can adjust the exposure value up to 2 stops in DPP, but I'd rather an native file with the right exposure to begin with. [:)]