Digital Travel Photography Digital Field Guide

Chapter 4. Working with Light

In This chapter

• Conquering available or continuous light

• Coping with intensity

• Coping with white balance

• Working with flash

• Using built-in flash

• Using external flash

As you take travel photos, you'll find that light is a basic tool and can be one of the things that sets your photos apart from countless others taken by picture-taking travelers who've also passed that way. The quantity and quality of the light you work with has an effect on every other aspect of your photography. The amount of light available controls whether you can make an exposure at all inside a dimly lit museum, how well you can stop action or slow down a shutter enough to use movement blur and other creative techniques at a bullfight, and how you apply selective focus to isolate an ancient artifact from its modern surroundings. The distribution of light affects the tonal values and contrast of your photo. The color of the light determines the hues you see.

In many ways, photography (light writing in ancient Greek) depends as much on how you use light as it does on your selection of a composition or a zoom setting. Great books have been written on working with lighting; for this field guide, I concentrate on some of the nuts and bolts of using the lighting tools available for your digital camera.

Light falls into two categories: continuous light sources, such as incandescent, daylight, and fluorescent light; and electronic flash. Both forms are important.

Conquering Available or Continuous ...