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Understanding Light

Light is probably one of the most important pieces of creating a beautiful and/or meaningful photograph. Light is so much more than just how it shines on your subject. The choices we make with light can convey emotion, visual interest, and voice. It's a very complex topic and something that we will study, as photographers, for the rest of our creative lives. There are so many layers to understanding light so my goal for this lesson is to give you a basic overview. I want you to understand how to understand lights output, direction, and a teensy bit of how to use it within your own work. For some of you, this may be a review, but my hopes are that it is beneficial, no matter your level of experience. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions.


Quality of Light


When discussing quality of light, a lot of photographers talk about this in terms of good or bad light. I would challenge you to move beyond this thinking. There is light we love and light that we don't, but none of it is good or bad. As we challenge ourselves to work in all types of light, we can come to love the characteristics that each type of light gives and learn how to use it in our work. BUT, I am not here to give a Ted Talk on how to view light 😂, I am here to talk to you about what the different qualities of light are and how to use them.


Hard Light - Hard light is light that comes from a small, unfiltered light source. This light creates strong contrast, well defined shadows, and bright highlights.










Soft Light - soft light is when your light source is diffused. It can be the sun diffused by the clouds or a speedlite diffused by a modifier. The characteristics of this light are soft shadows, more diffused highlights, and a more subtle contrast.







Soft light can also become flat light where that are almost no shadows. It's nice for portraits but doesn't really offer any contrast or depth to an image.






Next - we need to understand the direction of light


Front Light - this light illuminates the front of your subject fairly evenly, and depending on the quality of light, it can either create deep shadows behind them or it can become somewhat flat. The image above is an example of front light.



the light source (the sun) is behind me (the photographer) and is illuminating my subject in front of me. He is evenly lit on all sides facing me.


Side Light - this light is to the side of your subject. This type of light can be used in so many ways to create different looks.




Side light with subject angled towards the light

The sun is to my left so I turned the subject towards it. The light was hard light (as you can see by the definition in the shadows), so I lifted her head up in the hopes that the shadows would fall in a flattering way on her face. You can see the depth added in this image compared to my self portrait above that looks more flat.



Side light with the subject angled perpendicular to the light source

This light is somewhat diffused but you can see that my face is really illuminated on one side. This is similar to split lighting so if you'd like to see more dramatic examples of this, google "split lighting"



Side light where the subject is angled away from the light source

You can see this creates a different "feeling" than the other two positions.



Back light - the infamous backlight that everyone loves so much. Backlight is when the light is behind your subject. It can create beautiful sun flares and golden halos around our subject











Dynamic range


Dynamic Range is defined as Dynamic range is the ratio between the largest and smallest values that a certain quantity can assume. It is often used in the context of signals, like sound and light. It is measured either as a ratio or as a base-10 or base-2 logarithmic value of the difference between the smallest and largest signal values (wikipedia).


What the heck does that mean? In photography, it basically means the difference between the light from brightest to darkest.


Why is that important? Our eyes are extremely complex in the way we see light, so much so that they have not created a camera that can do what our eyes can do. Because of this, we have to learn how to reflect light so that we understand how to use it in a photograph. When light is hard, the dynamic range is extreme, right? So if the light is behind our subject, we have to reflect the light back onto our subject so they are exposed correctly.






I'm coming back to these 2 images. In the image above, the light is bright but so is the subject. In the image below, the subject is almost completely in the dark. What's the difference?


In the image on top, there are two factors that help the subject be exposed in the way I wanted him to be exposed. 1. The sand is a natural reflector. Shooting hard light at the beach is one of my favorites because the sand reflects the sun back onto the subject without a color cast. If he had been in a field of green grass, he would not have been as bright and his skin tones would have been a total mess. 2. I increase exposure in post using an adjustment brush. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to get some of the detail of the clouds in the sky and have him exposed the way I wanted.


In the second image, I wanted to maintain the warmth of the sunset in the sky, so I brought my exposure down as much as I could without losing the details in the shadows of the room. Had I wanted to do even more, I could have added a reflector behind him or used an artificial light such as a speedlite.



How to use this information in low light settings? Understanding how light works is important to low light because it helps you understand where to position your subject and how to use your in camera meter to set exposure.


If your light is hard light, you're going to want to expose for your highlights. In fact, I always underexpose a stop or two because highlights, especially in skin, can get blown so easily. If your light is a softer light, you can push the highlights a bit more and lift the shadows. If you are doing a portrait, the most flattering light is going to be front light and side light angled towards your light source. As you move your subject away from your light source, the imperfections in his/her skin are going to be more dramatic. If your subject is backlit, you're almost always going to need some kind of reflector. You can use white foam boards, a reflector, or an artificial light. Lastly, if your light is directly above you, you are going to want to do environmental shots or detail shots that don't illuminate the face because the shadows on the face won't be very flattering.



I hope all of this has been helpful. As you're learning, it's hard to know why you are making certain decisions so my suggestion to you is to try them all. Try using hard light, soft light, and light from all directions. See which ones give you the results you want and have fun with it! There is no right or wrong in photography. There is "what do I want my viewer to know about my subject and how can I relay that message". That is it. Please let me know if you have any questions!!!


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