Expert insight Reading the histogram

Carmen says… There’s no one perfect histogram shape; it largely depends on what you’re photographing. However, there is a way to position the histogram perfectly – and that’s to ‘expose to the right’. If there’s a lot of sky in the shot, expect a steep curve to the right. The trick is to ensure that this peak is towards the right for a nice bright exposure, but not bunched at the extreme right as this indicates that tones will be clipped to pure white and hold no detail. If the histogram is clipped to the left too, then shadows have fallen to pure black, and you’ll need lengthen the exposure time to rein shadow detail back in.