Exposure is subjective

There's no such thing as 'correct' exposure

…perhaps that should be qualified, the exposure is intended to satisfy your artistic vision.

Jetphotos criteria

What exactly is ‘correct’ exposure? No such thing exists; but it does exist for the screeners at these sites. Why do I say that? Because your photo can be rejected based on exposure.

What are the criteria? We’ll use Jetphotos as an example.

5.3 Overexposed

This means that the sensor or film was exposed to too much light and has resulted in the photo being pale in color and having a white cast to it.

Sometimes, instead of adjusting the brightness of the whole photo, an adjustment of curves or tones will give you better results.

As with underexposed photos, if unsure, check the histogram. It will show you,(sic) if a photo is overexposed or not.

and 5.4 Underexposed / Too dark

This means that the sensor or film was not exposed to enough light and has resulted in the picture being too dark or underexposed. Usually, the shadows will then look too dark, with a lack of details. The most important thing is for the aircraft to be correctly exposed, provided the rest of the image is not too dark or too bright your picture should be acceptable. Pictures taken under cloudy skies or at dusk and dawn frequently need to be brightened up to make them acceptable for the database, please remember to do this before uploading your picture.

If unsure, check the histogram. It will show you,(sic) if a photo is underexposed or not.

Pretty vague, eh?

What’s a histogram anyways?

Whenever you upload a picture to jetphotos.com, RGB and luminance histograms are generated. These are viewable in your photo editing program as well. Here’s an example of the Jetphotos version:

Things I could ascertain: I don’t want to make anything up so I will quote a staff post from their forum verbatim:

There should be no “flat line” on either side of the histogram. Try to correct that with the histogram sliders in your editing program (usually in the “levels” adjustments menu)

but also:

[…], in my case I find the histogram most useful for detecting under/overexposed areas in the image rather than overall contrast, but that’s just me. Others might be able to use to determine contrast effectively, but I’ve rarely found that to be the case for myself. But again, that’s just my opinion.

Weary photographer, may the odds be ever in your favour

Is there a perfect exposure, and does a histogram justify a rejection?

One of these histograms is from a picture already in the database, the other was rejected (for full disclosure, the other rejection reason was Too much or too little contrast perhaps a hint, but unrelated to exposure).

Which do you think was the rejected image?

Both photos are against a wispy high stratus cloud layer, so a light blue to cyan. The plane is in the same livery on approach to landing. The livery is also not white.

The large spikes are from the sky, the aircraft fuselage is the small hump on the right. Both show a “flat spot” in the higher brightness bins. Should these pictures be rejected for contrast?

Here’s the issue though, if the livery is not white, then you wouldn’t expect to see any pixels in this highest brightness bin. A great exam is C-GNBN (Air Canada)‘s retro TCA livery. Download any picture of that plane and there is a huge flat spot on the histogram. Does that represent poor contrast or under-exposure? Well, can’t possibly be underexposed if the images made it through screening…

A re-edit of the rejected image, adjusting the whites to bring it to the far right of the histogram. Did it improve the contrast of the image? Well, that’s subjective. Does it increase the contrast of the image. Yes of course. Straight out of camera, the rejected photo actually more accurately conveys the prevailing light conditions and a truer to life replication. The high contrast pictures is a stylistic choice by the screeners of Jetphotos.

This gives the characteristic eye blazingly bright whites in all these jetphotos pictures. (selected at random from the “Random photos” home page feature, not a criticism of any of these photographers, there are thousands of these to be found)

Be careful though, don’t get yourself into a Harsh Contrast or Overprocessed rejection!

Disagree? send us a message.