Digital Art Photography For Dummies®

Chapter 6. Composing a Shot Indoors

In This Chapter

• Setting your digital camera for indoor light

• Blurring images to create movement effect

• Discovering when to take an indoor picture with a flash

• Using indoor light fixtures to make art shots

• Seeing one-point perspective

Shooting indoors is inherently more difficult than shooting outdoors because you don't have optimal light — and what light you do have is often garish and harsh (creating sharp unintentional silhouettes) or has a color temperature that can give you unnatural tones (like how people turn green when shot under fluorescents or orange when shot under tungsten). And, after all, light is what drives photography. In this chapter, I show you tricks and tools for how to take that disadvantage and turn it into an artistic opportunity.

Finding the right type of light for your indoor shots is like performing a science experiment. Remember when you had to write a hypothesis in the form of a question and then answer that question? In an experiment with indoor lighting, your questions might be, "How do I light my object or scene so that my shot is clear and natural looking? Or interesting? Or have movement?" You can make dozens of hypotheses (questions) about using natural or man-made lighting — or both — to create a unique scene or present an object from either a traditional or a new viewpoint.

Start by thinking about the tools at your disposal ...