The Nature of
Blown Highlights W
hen highlights are said to be ‘blown’, it means that an area of a photograph has become solid white with no texture or detail. In most cases, this is the last thing you want. When photographers constantly check their exposure histogram, they are looking at the far right side of the graph to see if there is a spike. Spiking on the right, as shown at right, means that one or more areas in the photo are solid white, i.e. blown. When are blown highlights acceptable? I can think of three instances when solid white areas in a photograph are acceptable. They are: (1) When photographing the sun and/or its reflection in water or in any shiny surface, (2) when including the white background behind a model in a studio and the texture and detail in the background paper isn’t relevant, and (3) when point sources of light are included in the composition, such as street lamps, distant illuminated windows, and car headlights when doing night photography. In the photograph
of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco on the page 13, you can see that the streaks of headlights of the cars as well as the lampposts that line the bridge are blown out. This is perfectly fine in this situation. The histogram for this picture, though, would show the spike on the right side of the graph and a photographer could erroneously draw the conclusion that the
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