Friday Photography Tips #1 - Light
Sun Rising - Thomas David Kavanagh
When I deliver workshops or 1:1 training, there’s often a small bit of information that has a massive impact on how people take photos. Whether it’s the first time they realised they could control the exposure (brightness) of a shot on their iPhone or how to take a burst of images so they didn’t miss the decisive moment. It’s easy to take some of these things for granted but as is often the case in life, we don’t know what we don’t know.
This is the first of a weekly series of photography tips I’ll be sharing to help people take better photographs at work or at home. I hope you enjoy them and if you have any questions or suggestions please leave a comment or get in touch.
So let's talk a little about Light.
1. You Always Need More
When troubleshooting why someone’s photograph hasn’t turned out the way they’d hoped, the most typical answer is that there just wasn’t enough light. Out of focus or blurry images usually occur because there wasn’t enough light for the camera to accurately establish focus or the camera needed a slower shutter speed. Slow shutter speeds let more light in by capturing an image over a longer period of time so your hands moving or the subject moving will introduce blur. Our eyes are incredibly sophisticated and what might seem like a bright room to you, may not be to the camera. Go to the light!
"Long Exposure" - Slow shutter speeds shows movement as blur.
2. Find a Good Source
I’ve lost count of the number of times where I’ve transported lighting equipment that I never needed to take out of the case because I found a nice window instead. Window-light is fantastic for portraiture because it provides a large source of what is typically ‘soft light’, this is light without the harsh shadows you get with direct sunlight. Get your subject to look towards the window and you can get some amazing results. The image below shows a portrait taken in a room with two windows, one directly in front of the subject and the other is behind and to the subject’s right, providing a wonderful edge light.
Windows provide beautiful natural and even light.
3. Expose for the Highlights
A phrase you’ll often read in photography magazines and text books, this is effectively saying that you shouldn’t allow the brightest part of your images to be too bright. Despite the wonderful advances in digital technology, when part of your image is pure white it means the detail is lost and can never be recovered. However, darker parts of an image can often be recovered using editing software. With this in mind it is always better for your photograph to be a little darker than too bright. Use the link below to watch a tutorial I created on how to edit environmental portraits using the free Adobe Photoshop Express app on Android or iPhone.
Happy Friday,
Tom
