Digital Wedding Photography For Dummies

Lighting: Making Every Hour Magic Hour

If your camera is the brain of photography, then light is the heart and soul. Lighting is one of the most important elements of photography, from setting the mood of a picture down to enabling the camera to operate. The quality of light in your photo determines whether the image lives or dies.

The tricky part about lighting is that there are very few situations during a wedding that provide you with that “magic hour” kind of light (also known as golden hours, which I talk about in Using natural light) in which your subjects are illuminated by soft, even lighting. For the most part, it’s up to you and your ingenuity to figure out how to shape the available light into something that will make your subjects look good.

In the following sections, I go over some basic lighting principles, outlining how to use available natural light and how to create your own light in unfavorable conditions. I also point out common situations with difficult lighting that you may face during a wedding and how to overcome those challenges.

Distinguishing hard light and soft light

Despite being surrounded by sunlight and artificial light every day, you probably rarely stop and think about how lighting from different sources affects the illumination of a subject. To turn mediocre pictures into great pictures, an understanding of the different types of light is necessary.

Light can be broken down into two categories: hard light and soft light.

Hard light: Light from ...