“Exposure is the heartbeat of photography… If you try to overlook this key fundamental, your photography will never realize its full creative potential.” That’s the compelling message of this extraordinary tutorial.

It explains why automatic settings limit the digital camera’s artistic possibilities, and shows with a gallery of spectacular examples how technically “incorrect” exposures achieve dramatic effects—creating bold silhouettes or blazing highlights, manipulating depth of field, blurring to give the sense of motion, or freezing fast action.

This exhaustive state-of-the-art manual covers all aspects of its subject, from the basics of metering and the use of flash and filters, to the four-thirds system and exposure in the digital darkroom.