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Painting with Light

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It all starts with an understanding how available light can change from hour to hour, and season to season – and how much it impacts the pictures you take.

Remember, people today see photos everywhere: in newspapers, glossy magazine ads, e-mail attachments, and on the kitchen refrigerator. It's easy to get a little jaded from this visual bombardment, so if you want some attention given to your photos, you need to make an effort to give them a wow-factor. The way to do it is through the use of light.

Photo Credit: Mia Rose

Rob Sheppard, professional photographer, distinguishes between using light for illumination and using light for impact: 'Light for impact is light that is unexpected and does more than simply illuminate the subject. Light is always important in a photograph, and can be quite beautiful without having impact. If the light simply helps you see the subject better, it is light for illumination, not impact.'

Two examples of the type of light that really make a difference in your photography, are backlight and the spotlight effect. Backlight is consistently a dramatic, high-impact light and occurs when you shoot into the light. The spotlight effect on the other hand, is light that dramatically lights part of the scene while the rest stays in shadow. It's like a spotlight at the theater. It immediately tells the viewer where to look. The drama from the contrast of the light and shadow gives the image its impact.

...so what about Shadows?

Shadows are what allows a two-dimensional image - the photograph - to show the three-dimentional depth of a scene. Without shadows, your pictures will look flat and featureless.

When you're out shooting in daylight, notice the interplay of light and shadow and how this shows the depth of the scene. In fact, shadows actually make very interesting subjects in their own right.

• Watch how the light interacts with both the subject and its surroundings. Check that the light illuminates and complements the most important parts of your subject.

• Be careful with sharp backgrounds that have a mix of light and shadow. Contrasts that are too harsh will attract the viewer"s eye away from the subject at the least, and can destroy a composition at the worst.

• Look for lower sun on your scene for the best backlight. This occurs early and late in the day for most of the year, though in winter, it can happen through nearly all of the day because the sun stays low.

• Dawn and dusk – or the so-called ‘golden hours of the day’ are the best time to take pictures, with the light changing by the minute. The quality of the light at the end of the day is especially photogenic.

• The nearer you get to sunrise or sunset the warmer (more orange) the light and the longer the shadows. Warm light creates lovely atmospheric shots.

• The worst time of day for most scenic shots is midday, when the sun is directly above. This tends to produce the flattest, least interesting shots – and it’s also when haze can become a real problem.

• During winter, the sun is quite low in the sky, and typically produces long, sharp shadows, which add depth to scenic shots, and at the start and end of the day bathes them in a warm glow that just oozes atmosphere. The disadvantage of winter light is that it can be difficult to capture images containing strong, bright colours, and the sky is rarely deeply blue.

• In the summer months, the sun sits very high in the sky, is very bright and produces a slightly ‘cool’ light (a bit blue). Look out for deep blue skies during the last hours of the day. Conversely, shooting at midday in the summer will produce images almost without shadows, which means you will lose all sense of depth in a scene.

• Experiment with bracketing your shots. Use the auto bracket function common to many cameras today, both film and digital. This provides you with a set of exposures so you can select the best.

• One way of rescuing harsh photos taken at midday is to convert to black and white. With a little adjustment to the brightness and contrast in post-production, you can get great results.

If you found inspiration on our painting with light page, feel free to browse the following pages too:

Related Pages

* Light Photography: The Golden Hours of Dawn and Dusk

* Low Light Photography Tips

* Sunset Photography Tips

* Night Photography Techniques

* What is Exposure?

* All about Photography

Hope you enjoyed our light photography tips!

(From Painting with Light back to Basic Photography Tips Home Page)

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