Both of these types of exposure have impacted the light I’ve allowed into my life. I can live on my terms, changing my exposure as I go.

This essay was composed in October 2024 and uses APA documentation.

When I was seventeen, I went on my first photo walk with my dad. We walked around Salt Lake City taking pictures of all the things we thought were cool. I really liked the color contrast of the murals all over the buildings, but for some reason, I couldn’t quite capture it on my camera. All the pictures came out dark, and I was starting to get frustrated. I complained to my dad about this, and it took him all of two seconds to realize my exposure was too low. He explained to me that the exposure changes how much light will be in the picture; if my exposure was too high, the picture would be washed out. If it was too low, the picture would be too dark to discern. He taught me how to change the exposure, how to know what level of exposure was best for different pictures, and how to adjust to different light levels. I paid as much attention as a seventeen-year-old with ADHD who wanted to get back to taking pictures could manage, and then I went back to the areas I’d taken pictures before. This time, I adjusted the exposure to what it should have been. The pictures looked like they should turn out well this time! I was hopeful. I took a picture, checked the camera… and I could see all of the colors I was hoping to capture! I hugged my dad, thanked him, and went on to take the best pictures I could with improved exposure and a little experience.

In the realm of photography, “exposure” is defined as “The amount of light that reaches your camera’s sensor, creating visual data over a period of time” (What is an exposure, 2024). Less formally, “Camera exposure is the overall brightness or darkness of a photograph” (Photography basics, 2021). There are three components of exposure: shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Shutter speed is how long the camera shutter is open; the longer the shutter is open, the brighter the photo will be, since there’s more time to let light in. Aperture is the size of the opening that lets light in. It affects how deep or shallow your depth of field is depending on whether the opening is smaller or larger, respectively. ISO is how sensitive a camera is to light (Photography basics, 2021). All of these components collaborate to change how bright a photograph comes out. There are a lot of different parts to this definition of exposure, but it’s still not quite as complicated as the next definition of exposure I learned about two years later.

This past summer, I was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). It wasn’t something I was expecting; I had a very specific image of what OCD was in my head, and I didn’t think I fit that definition. I thought OCD was the “I need everything in my life to be clean and perfect and organized” disorder. And while that’s partially true, there’s a lot more to OCD than I realized. There are themes that vary depending on the person (contamination, harm, perfectionism, social, etc.), and I was experiencing a lot of them at once. I started attending a clinic for OCD and anxiety, and the more I learned about OCD, the more I started recognizing the symptoms in myself. I’ve always been an anxious person. I’ve always had perfectionistic tendencies. I’ve always been scared of being “contaminated” or “unclean”, and I’ve always worried about whether I can trust my own mind. It never occurred to me that all of those could be part of one diagnosis. Had I never attended this clinic, I would have stayed the anxious mess I’d been all my life; instead, I started learning how to combat my fears. For OCD, Exposure and Response Therapy is the most effective method for improvement (Greene, 2024).

I’d heard of the term “exposure therapy” before starting it myself. I thought it was just doing the things I was scared of, and eventually, the fear would go away through no real effort of my own. This is not the case. The approach is very much the same – do things you’re scared of and see what happens – but it’s not something that just works immediately and then everything is fine. Exposure Response Therapy means practicing confronting the things that make you anxious while being mindful about it. Noticing what kinds of things you want to do to make the fear less scary (these are called “neutralizers”), and stopping yourself from doing them. In the clinic I attended, I learned about the “False Alarm Cycle” (National Experts in OCD, 2024). It goes like this: Something triggers your obsession. For this example, let’s say it’s something that would trigger harm OCD, like picking up a knife. This trigger causes a perceived threat to come to mind. In this instance, that could be something like, “What if I accidentally hurt myself or someone else?” Obviously, this is a very distressing thought to be having. So this perceived threat, and the distress that comes with it, triggers the urge to neutralize.

Neutralizing can look like any number of things. It can involve avoiding the situation altogether, like having someone cut fruit for you or buying pre-cut fruit, or engaging in a different neutralizing behaviour if it’s unavoidable. This can look like reciting “I’m not going to hurt anyone” over and over, closely examining your thoughts or movements to see if they indicate that you might hurt someone, or looking back over the memory later to make sure everything went okay and you didn’t miss anything. Once someone has performed a neutralizing behaviour, it confirms the perceived threat, and they’ll continue to be distressed about that thing in the future. Exposures aim to break that cycle.

Exposures are designed to help you tackle the distressing thing and prevent it from being so distressing in the future. For me, some of those included doing spelling tests with absurdly hard words (to target my perfectionism), resisting washing my hands multiple times after doing a task that I perceived as unclean (to target my contamination anxiety), and performing some of the songs I wrote (to target the idea that I don’t deserve to take up people’s time). The exposures were very scary at first, and sometimes I wondered if they would even help. But the more I did them, the more comfortable I became. I started to be okay with myself. I started to learn to live with uncertainty.

At seventeen, I learned how to adjust my exposure to give my photographs the right amount of light. At nineteen, I learned how to adjust my exposures to give my life the right amount of light. I learned how to make the brightness of my life reflect the brightness of the photos I take with my dad. Sometimes, I need to set the camera’s exposure lower so I can capture the light contrast. Sometimes, I need to make the exposure higher so I can capture the colors. Sometimes, I need to do different exposures to ensure that I’m tackling the right fear at the right time. Both of these types of exposure have impacted the light I’ve allowed into my life. I can live on my terms, changing my exposure as I go.

References

Greene, Dr. P. (2024, August 17). What are ERP & ExRP therapy for OCD? – Manhattan CBT. Manhattan Center for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. https://manhattancbt.com/what-is-erp-and-what-is-exrp/#:~:text=ERP%20was%20pioneered%20in%20the,and%20Ritual%20Prevention%20(ExRP)

National experts in OCD, anxiety, and related diagnoses. OCD Anxiety Centers. (2024, April 25). https://www.ocdanxietycenters.com/

Photography basics: What is exposure? understanding how exposure affects your photographs – 2024. MasterClass. (2021, August 24). https://www.masterclass.com/articles/photography-basics-what-is-exposure-understanding-how-exposure-affects-your-photographs

What is an exposure in photography? | adobe. (2024). https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography/discover/exposure-in-photography.html