Chasing the Light: Improving Your Photography with Available Light

Light’s Impact on Color

One of the more important things I’ve come to understand is how the quality of the light impacts the rendering of color in a photograph. If you think a red door is always a red door, think again. The color of the door appears to change in appearance relative to the quality of the light that’s illuminating it. If you shoot that door under direct sunlight and then later, on a cloudy day, the resulting photographs will be markedly different, as the hue of the red changes and shifts.

Colors under direct sunlight possess more vibrancy and saturation. There is a “pop” to such colors that is a result not only of the harshness of the light, but also of the increased contrast that such illumination produces. Those same colors ...