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Photography Lighting Tips
 | Light Direction | Moonlight | Night Lights | Using Your Flash | |
Click the tabs to jump down the page | Fill-In Flash | Light Metering | Silhouettes | Dramatic Lighting | Indoor Natural Lighting |
Lighting In photography, light conditions make or break a shot. The colour, direction, and light quality are all important factors that must be taken into consideration. Below are a handful of techniques for getting it right under tricky conditions.
Light Quality Hard-light throws itself across the landscape, forming brilliant highlights and creating jet-black shadow areas. Soft-light opens up worlds of subtle hues and gradations and provides a gentle but pleasant mood for both landscapes and portraits. Because you can't alter the quality of light (other than choosing different times of the day or days with different weather), the key factor is to match it to a compatible subject: hard-light to accent the graphic lines of an industrial landscape, or soft-light for a group photo. |
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From the second the sun rises, daylight is constantly shifting in colour. Whilst we may notice the particularly golden light of dawn or the blue lights of twilight, our eyes and brain tend to neutralize the gradual colour changes in between, making daylight appear colourless. The colour of daylight however, has a profound effect on the mood of a photograph, and the key for a photographer is knowing how this affects the emotional content of an image enabling you to control the mood of all your photos. A castle bathed in the cool blues and greys of twilight may seem mysterious or gloomy. The same castle splashed in the yellow and amber glory of early morning appears to be safe or welcoming. Changes in daylight's colour are most dramatic at the start and end of the day so work quickly at these times to help capture the mood you are trying to achieve. | ||
The direction in which a light source catches a scene, relative to the position of the camera has a significant effect on the colour, texture, and depth in the resulting photograph. Front lighting spills over your shoulder and falls squarely on the front of your subject. Because front lighting is very even, auto-exposure camera systems handle it well. It produces bold, saturated colours; but when too strong it can actually wash out some colours. The downside with front light is that because all the shadows are falling behind the subject and away from the camera, front lit scenes lack depth or a three dimensional feel. Side lighting comes from the left or right of a subject. Because the light is scraping across from side to side, it catches every bump and imperfection in the subject, leaving large and small shadows and exaggerating textures. It's ideal for landscapes, like desert badlands or beaches, where you want to convey the tactile qualities of a subject. Sidelight also imparts form and three dimensionality to objects, giving a pumpkin its full roundness or a tree trunk its volume. Gentle side lighting, especially from slightly above, works well for portraits because it creates a delicate modelling of facial features. Backlighting can produce theatrical effects, particularly with landscape images. Shadows coming towards the camera exaggerate depth and distance and help lead the eye into the scene. When backlighting is used behind partly translucent subjects, like leaves or human hair, it creates a bright fringe called rim lighting that helps separate subjects from their surroundings. In backlit portraits, however, you may need to increase your exposure by 1 to 1 1/2 stops over the metered value to keep faces from being lost in shadow. An alternative solution is to use flash fill. Remember to keep the sun itself out of the frame or it will trick the meter into heavy underexposure. With many subjects, you can change the apparent direction of lighting simply by altering your shooting position—by taking a short walk if you're shooting a close-up of a house or an animal or a drive in the car if you're shooting a landscape scene. |
Opportunities for shooting a moonlit landscape only occur a few nights a month as the moon enters into, and then out of, its full phase. When these moments occur, it's nice to know the best ways to capture them. Typically you can photograph two types of moonscapes - those that feature the moon itself in the frame and those that are simply the landscape lit by the light of the moon. Shooting the latter requires a very bright moon and a relatively high ISO of around 800 or higher. The best time to shoot landscapes that include the moon is just as the moon is beginning to rise. The moon appears at its largest at this time due to the visual land reference of the horizon and the refraction of the earths atmosphere. As lighting is mainly from the twilight sky, you'll still get a good amount of foreground detail. Look for simple scenes you can compose with a zoom lens of 300mm or longer; remember that the longer the lens, the larger the moon will appear. Exposure can be based on meter readings of the foreground, but be careful to avoid exposure of more than a couple of seconds or the moons shape will become elongated. If your camera allows you to make exposures of several seconds or longer, landscapes illuminated exclusively by the full moon but not including the moon can make eerie, surreal pictures. The technique works best with snow covered land or beaches, because light reflected from snow or sand brightens the entire scene. Exposures will still be quite long: even with the ISO set at around 800 or 1000, start with exposures of two seconds at f/2.8 and them make several additional exposures, doubling the time for each successive shot (if you have a manual-exposure mode) or adding extra light with your exposure compensation feature. be aware that you'll definitely require a tripod to ensure a sharp image.
If you're a dab-hand with Adobe photoshop (or similar software) and are feeling creative, consider taking two exposures - one of the moon with a telephoto/zoom lens of around 300mm or longer, and then a landscape with a normal lens and combine the two shots. The moon will appear huge against the landscape. | |
Night time is loaded with bright and colourful subjects to shoot such as neon lights, well lit landmarks and fireworks etc. The bold stripes and squiggles of neon lights are colourful and provide good results over a wide range of exposures. Sometimes the lights are bright enough that you can take handheld exposures with the camera set to a reasonably fast ISO of around 400 or 800. Sometimes a single sign will work as a whole composition, but more often than not you'll create stronger images by moving in close to pick out patterns or abstract designs within a sign. A colourful slice of pizza in a restaurant sign, for example. In neon-heavy locations such as Las Vegas or Piccadily Circus use a telephoto lens to compress the space and squeeze a number of lights into a brilliant abstract composition.
With fun-fairs and amusement parks packed full of night lights you can get a bird's-eye-view by climbing aboard the Ferris wheel. Lighting will be fairly dim, so use a very fast ISO setting of 1000 to 1600 for sharp handheld photos, or use a tripod and long shutter speeds at ground level to capture the twists and turns of the motion of the rides.
Bridges, fountains, and monuments are often more interesting to shoot at night, when they are theatrically lit and the darkness hides other distracting surroundings. Use a tripod to steady the camera, and make long exposures so you can use small apertures to ensure maximum depth of field. Exposure isn't critical - move in close and take readings of just the lit areas (or use your spot-meter mode if your digital camera has one), and bracket exposures a stop or two in both directions using your exposure-bracketing feature. Don't worry about getting a correct colour balance as most night scenes include a variety of light types and there really is no way to balance them all in one photograph. |
Fast ISO speeds and good lenses make it easy to work in all but the lowest lighting conditions, but there are still times when turning to a flash device is a better alternative. Because the duration of flash is so brief, you can use it to get sharp pictures of moving subjects in very dark surroundings, like dancers at a west-end show (if they let you take photographs of course...) The drawback of flash of course is that it produces a comparatively harsh and obtrusive light. Most point-and-shoot cameras and many DSLR cameras have a built in flash that is capable of producing good results over a reasonable range, typically from about 3 to 15 feet. Accessory flash units for DSLRs are considerably more powerful and sophisticated than built-ins, often giving you a shooting range of 100 feet or more. Most accessory flash units these days are "dedicated," meaning that they're designed for use with a specific brand and/or model of camera and use sophisticated circuitry to communicate between camera and flash. for example The flash automatically knows the ISO setting of the camera and sets its output accordingly. In addition, virtually all digital cameras use 'TTL' (through the lens) light metering, so that the camera measures the reflected flash at the sensor plane and shuts off the unit when enough light has been supplied. Flash exposure in general is very accurate. A problem peculiar to taking portraits with any type of electronic flash is the phenomenon known most commonly as 'red eye', the eery red glint in peoples eyes often seen in photos. Red-eye occurs as the flash reflects off the rear surface of the retina. Many flash units, both built-in and accessory, have a red-eye-reduction feature that uses a series of brief pre-flashes to constrict the pupil, thereby eliminating the effect. This is a feature worth paying extra for if you photograph people often and of course, will require you to activate the setting... | |
Although making dark places brighter is the primary use of flash, the next best place to impliment it is outdoors in bright sunlight. One of the problems of taking photographs, especially individual or group portraits, using the bright midday sun is that the harsh lighting creates deep, distracting shadows. In people pictures, this usually means dark rings around the eyes and unattractive shadows under the nose and lips. Fill-in flash lightens these shadows to create more attractive portraits. Fill-in flash looks most natural when its around 1 stop darker than the main light source. When the flash-to-daylight ratio is too even, or when flash overpowers the existing light, the balance looks false, drawing attention to the fact that you used your flash. Until the advent of built-in and dedicated accessory flash units, calculating for fill-in flash was like doing the math for sending a rocket into space. It was easier to wait for different natural lighting conditions. Today, most built-in and dedicated flash units have a mode just for fill-in flash. Basically, all you do is point and shoot. The camera reads the ambient lighting and then kicks out just enough flash to fill shadows but leaves the end result looking natural. Many dedicated accessory flash units will let you set a specific flash-to-daylight ratio, so you can alter the brightness either way. Because a dedicated flash's output is paired to the auto-focusing system, the camera will even knows the distance to your subject.
Fill-in flash should not be limited to taking pictures of people. I frequently use it to open up the deep shadows in my close-up photography of architectural details and abstract images. |
If built-in exposure meters are as sophisticated as the camera manufacturers claim, why do people still get badly exposed photos? The truth is that while most built-in meters are incredibly accurate, they can be fooled. Fortunately there are ways to trick difficult subjects into submission, provided you can recognise the difficult situation in the first instance. Light meters are calibrated to give you good exposure for subjects of normal brightness, fortunately most outdoor subjects are of normal brightness. The problems pop up when you want to photograph subjects that are much lighter or darker than average. Rather than recording such scenes as you see them, the camera will see, and record, them as a medium tone. Instead of clean white snow you'll get a depressing gray winter wonderland and instead of a pitch-black horse, you'll get a gray nag. If your subject is nearby, or very large, the easiest solution is to take a close-up light reading and then adjust your exposure using the exposure-compensation dial manually by a 1 or 2 stops. for example, to photograph a swan, you could take a direct reading of the swan in the frame and then add 1 1/2 stops of exposure. This would record the swan as white and still cast the water into blackness. To photograph a deep black crow in a field, take a reading from the bird and subtract one to two exposure stops to keep it black. The problem gets tedious when you are photographing a relatively small average-toned subject against a very dark or light background, like a person lying on a bright sandy beach. The best recourse here is to use your spot-metering mode and take a reading of just the subject. This way, your main subject will be correctly exposed, even if, because of the contrast, you lose some detail in the background. Yet another solution is to scout the scene for something of average brightness (green leaves would be good) and set your exposure for that. Practice this time and time again on various subjects in your surroundings and soon it will become second nature so you won't miss that critical shot when it really matters. | |
In photography, the easiest and most effective way to reveal a subjects shape is by creating a silhouette. You can use silhouettes in your photographs to dramatize subjects whenever the shape is more important than form or texture, or just to jazz up your slide shows. Think of the infamous Charlies Angles silhouette pose of the girls. To create silhouettes, simply put an opaque object in front of a bright background and expose for the background. Any brightly coloured surface will work - a glittering golden sea at sunset, a painted wall or even the illuminated glass of an aquarium. Alas, intriguing subjects and colourful backgrounds don't just appear when you want them to. You'll have to use your creative spark to spot the potential of a bright background and then hunt around until you match it with a suitable foreground subject to make a dramatic composition. Look for subjects that have bold and simple shapes. It's important too that the subject can be entirely surrounded by the bright background. A fisherman on the beach at sunrise will produce a clearly identifiable shape, but fishing boats lined up closely in a row may merge into a dark unrecognisable shape. Exposing for silhouettes is fairly simple - as with shooting a sunset, a variety of exposures will produce good results. If your camera has an averaging meter (as most point-and-shoot camera's do), point the viewfinder toward the brighter area and then use your exposure-lock feature (half depress the shutter button) to hold that exposure and then point the viewfinder back towards your composition and depress the shutter the rest of the way. If you have a DSLR camera with a spot-metering feature, take a reading of just the bright area and then bracket in half- or full-stop increments toward overexposure. |
One of the great thrills of photography when on your travels is coming unexpectedly upon a sudden and dramatic light phenomenon when the light's direction, colour, or intensity stops you in your tracks. When on your travels you often don't have the luxury of waiting by a scene for a spectacular bit of lighting, but if you know when such light is likely to occur, you can be on the lookout for it and plan things around it. Among the best times to expect dramatic lighting are just before or after a storm. Storms often end with dozens of brilliant rays of sun bursting through a bank of dark grey clouds. Similar displays occur on almost any sunny day inside many cathedrals, when the sun pierces the highest windows and a thousand rays gleam down on the altar. Another way to increase your odds of capturing these moments is to rise before the sun and linger until long after it has set.
In addition to the theatrics of sunset and sunrise, the low-angle light of these times often brings high drama creating unusual shadows and shapes. | |
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