During the Holidays I spent a little too much time having fun(drinking) with friends and family who were in town....so last week when there was a nice day I decided to get out into the fresh air. I went for a walk down the towpath and over to Indigo Lake, a place I've been going since I was a kid.
I always pictured Indigo as this peaceful place that the local Indians must have gathered, so it was ironic to learn that it was actually a gravel mine.....the miners hit a spring and the lake formed in the pit(they borrowed a irrigation pump from Szalays's Farm to buy some time and get their equipment out).

Anyways, over the summer I read an article on The Luminous Landscape called Understanding Histograms that changed the way I shoot.The histogram is a graph shows you your exposure from dark to light(left to right) - I now only use the image on the back of my camera to see my composition - I use the histogram to check my exposure.

Then a few weeks ago I found another article pertaining to histograms on the LL site called Expose Right. I'm not going to rewrite the whole article but the gist of it is that there is much more information in a digital image in the brighter end of the spectrum...so that if you overexpose your image a bit(push the histogram right) and then correct for it when converting your RAW image, you will end up with less noise and a better image.

In the above photo I used this technique - I had also taken a few images at what my camera's light meter said was a proper exposure and I did feel the image using the new technique came out better. I think that this is something that will work best for landscape style photography. Also - it is important to remember this only really works if you are shooting RAW and to be careful not to blow out the highlights completely when trying this...