Digital Photography Digital Field Guide

Chapter 4. Lighting Your Photos

In This Chapter

• Observing light

• Source and direction of light

• Front lighting

• Side lighting

• Backlighting

• Character, intensity, and color of light

• How light changes

• Shadows created by light

• Ambient light

• Sunlight

• Incandescent and fluorescent

• On-camera flash

If digital photography is about capturing time in a two-dimensional frame, the tool used for this capture is light. Reduced to its barest minimum, photography takes place when an exposure occurs. To make an exposure means to capture what the cameras sees, and the camera uses light to see. Without light, there is no photograph.

This means that the photographer needs to learn about light, observe light, and learn to light photos.

A possible objection, if you are thinking of nature photography, is that the lighting is not yours but rather chances of weather, position, time of day, and so on. Essentially it is something you can't control. This may be true, but the photographer should learn how to manipulate these elements to take the best possible advantage of existing light. To achieve this goal, the first step is to become a careful observer of light.

If you learn to observe light, and manipulate it when necessary to benefit your pictures, your photographs will improve—and you'll have more fun photographing. This chapter teaches you the basic vocabulary to understand how your pictures are lit, provides you with some photographic techniques to make better use of the light that is available, and shows you how to improve ...