What Is Good Exposure?
It can vary from photographer to photographer, but at the core, images with good exposure have skin tones, textures, colors and tonalities that represent the way they are in life. From that base, you can underexpose or overexpose images to create your own interpretation of how you see the world.
A Paradox
It’s helpful to have two paradoxical ideas in your head at the same time: (1) There’s a single correct base exposure and (2) for the same image, there can be many correct aesthetic exposures. Once you learn to achieve solid base exposures, you can alter them to match your aesthetic intent. You could, for instance, expose “day for night”1 by underexposing your daylight image two stops, ...
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