Maintain the colour – Photography in Archaeology
Photos can often end up looking washed out and the automatic mode will judge the colours of a scene incorrectly thus over exposing it. What we will try to do here is force the camera to underexpose.
Virtually every camera has the ability to under or overexpose. This is called exposure compensation and is indicated by a square icon with a + in the top corner and a – in the lower corner. +/-. Pressing this button will normally bring up a scale running from -2 to +2 EV, and using either a dial or buttons you can choose the setting you want.
A setting of -1 will halve the exposure (making it darker) a setting of +1 will
double the exposure (making it brighter). Experiment on the same subject to
see the effect.
This is one of the few techniques that can be replicated using photo software
on your PC. Most washed out photographs can be ‘corrected’ by utilising
image editing software to increase the contrast and the colour saturation
whilst reducing the brightness.
