Digital Art Photography For Dummies®

Chapter 5. Composing a Shot Outdoors

In This Chapter

• Using natural light to your advantage

• Mastering common outdoor situations

• Boosting natural light

You have many ways at your disposal to compose a shot outdoors. Fortunately, natural light is more than adequate, rain or shine, to give you a decent image provided that you compose your shot with care. When composing a shot outdoors, remember to assess where the sun is, what distance you want to be from your subject, and how many objects you are focusing on.

Keep in mind, also, that as a digital art photographer, you have help — in the form of an image processing program that comes later in your digital safari.

Shooting with Natural Light

When you shoot outdoors, light is your natural friend. After all, light is what drives photography. However, the tricks that light can play on your exposures can prove to be gremlins that can haunt — or help — your shots. You can creatively master how your camera reads light via its settings, which help you set the exposure you want, manually. Of course, auto settings are at your fingertips as well, and can come in handy when shooting under less-than-optimal lighting conditions, like an overcast day, as in Figure 5-1.

When you set your camera to automatic, you don't need to know much about f-stops, shutter speeds, and depth of field. Automatic settings let your camera calculate how the f-stop and shutter speed ...