Let There Be Light

My first two tutorials have been a light look at some technical aspects of photography.  I gave you a quick explanation of the different modes on your camera and we addressed aperture. Hopefully you had a chance to play around with your camera and try out some of the things I attempted to explain.  If so, I'd love to see some of your photographs - please feel free to link to them in the comments.

Today, let's get artsy!  Let's talk about LIGHT.  Perhaps you're scratching your head trying to figure out how this will help you understand your camera better, but I promise you, this is the key to good photography. I don't care what kind of camera you have, if you know how to use light to your advantage, you can make your photographs stand out.   

We all understand that light is necessary for photography but good light is what makes it magical.  This is where photography becomes an art.  There's not really a right or wrong but I can give you some things to think about.  In general, when shooting portraits, we want to avoid direct light. It's harsh and unflattering; it can create distracting shadows. This is why photographers love cloudy days, because the clouds are diffusing the light for you. So what to do on a bright, sunny day?  Find shade.  Find buildings or fences or trees or anything that you can put between you and the sun.  The trick is to make sure that light isn't mottled or splotchy.  Also, bear in mind, if there's an area of direct sun in the background, that will blow out in your image - which may or may not bother you.

You'll also want to pay attention to the light in someone's eyes.  Do you know about catch lights?  If not, catch lights are the reflections of light in a person's eyes.

Catch lights give sparkle to the eyes, and that sparkle gives your photograph life.

The best time of day for photos is a magical time that happens twice a day. Photographers refer to it as The Golden Hour.  It's the first hour of sunlight and the last hour of sunlight.  The warm light is generally considered pleasing. The long shadows can help give dimension and depth to landscape photography.

Now typically when you're shooting outside, you play this complicated dance with the sun. The rule of thumb is that you want to keep the sun behind you. If you're taking photographs of people, you want to make sure they're not squinting into the sun. If you need to put the sun behind your subjects, you might want to use a flash fill.  Basically this means you're going to force the flash to fire, which will make sure there are no funky shadows on their face. But sometimes you may want to embrace the back light.

Before I go, let me give you a quick crash course on metering. Camera designers have done extensive research (seriously) and discovered that the average photograph is is a certain percentage gray. 18% gray is the number commonly thrown around.  Some people say it's actually 12% gray, but personally that difference isn't affecting *me* too much.  The point I want to make is that there are probably a lot of times when your photograph *isn't* 12% gray so you need to know how to compensate for this.  If the photograph has a lot of light - like snow, or a sandy beach - then the meter is going to want you to underexpose so you need to know to compensate.  Having said that, camera meters have gotten quite sophisticated and they do a pretty good job getting it right.  My camera has several different metering options; matrix metering, center-weighted metering and spot metering. Spot metering allows you to select a point on your camera and the camera will use this for it's metering calculations.  Center-weighted metering is essentially the same thing except that the "spot" is the middle of the frame. But I usually leave it on matrix metering. I've read up a little bit on matrix metering and the engineering that went into it but I can't claim to be an expert.  What I can tell you is that it does a remarkable job at figuring out the correct exposure. Of course when you're trying to be artistic, you might need to outsmart the meter but in general, it works very well.

I'm not sure that I've done a very good job explaining this stuff so please ask any questions you might have.

ASSIGNMENT:
This week's assignment is all about the catch lights. Find some willing subject (or in a pinch, a less cooperative subject will do) and try taking a portrait in good light with nice catch lights. If the light isn't good, find a way to make the light good.