Histograms - Day 18 of 365!

I try to keep up with everyone's 365 photo projects every few days (which is a lot of work, there are a ton of people doing this now!).  On Marissa's blog, *Tired with Joy* -- she had learned pay more attention to her histogram.  I have always looked at my histogram with my highlight alert on to make sure I'm not clipping/blowing anything.  (If you have this feature on your camera and aren't using it, I really recommend it!)  Today I took it a step further. 

With setting my meter to my typical 1/3 stop to the right, this was my SOOC shot:  (Only PPing was fixing the WB and typical +50 Brightness & +25 contrast for RAW to JPG conversion)



I looked at my histogram, it was way over to the Left, with only a slight clipping of the blacks (which I was okay with for just a quick photo of my cat).  But I thought hmm...let's play with this!  So I changed my settings to where if just looking at my meter, I would have thought I was WAY overexposed.  But from my very small understanding of histograms, the image looked better. This was the SOOC for the better histogram shot (same PPing):



& here is my edit:





Over the next couple of weeks I hope to be able to learn more about histograms and how to read them.  I really want to start "getting it right" SOOC to cut down on my PPing time and have less noise in my photos by fixing exposure issues!


& we all know I can't have just one photo.  So here are a couple more!




My wonderful hubby.  Please excuse the vacuum cleaner, it is just proof that occasionally I really do clean.