People and Place - Exercise 3 - Experimenting with light

10 tips for working with light!

• Seek the shade - Look for a shaded area outdoors for the advantage of softer, more even light.
• Use a reflector - A reflector is incredibly useful for throwing a touch of light back into a scene and brightening up shadow areas.
• Fill-flash - What a reflector cant handle, fill-flash will.  TTL metering will tell your flash how much power to output, and use exposure compensation to dial the flash down a touch.
• Use the golden hour - This doesn't just apply to landscape shoots.  Make use of natural light at the beginning and end of the day, when the sun is low in the sky and a beautifully soft, warm and golden light often fills the air.
• Use a diffuser - A diffuser can serve as a soft-box and allow you to create a softer type of lighting.
• Prevent squinting - Photographers often avoid shooting into the sun.  But if you need to, its much better to deal with the issues than to have subjects squinting and looking uncomfortable.
• Flare - Many photographers actually seek to make a virtue of lens flare caused by shooting into the sun.  It wont suit every type of subject and you have to make sure it is not ruining the image - but lens flare can often make an image look modern and engaging.
• Use patterns - Look for the way the light is falling through leaves, branches or window blinds indoors as this can result in the formation of interesting patterns
• Distance matters - If you're working with window light, you can reduce the contrast by simply moving your subject further away from the window.  Your subject will be less bright and the shadows wont be as deep
• Overcast weather will work - Don't be afraid of overcast weather conditions.  The clouds will act as a giant soft-box, ensuring that the light is even and easy to work with.  You could consider using a gold reflector to throw warmer light back onto the subject.

Natural Light (taken in the shade on a sunny day)

 

2. Reflected light from white walls

 

 

 

I used my daughters bedroom for this image as she has white walls, I asked her to sit on the bed resting against the wall with the window behind to the right.  I also converted to black and white as there was a distraction of cerise pink in the background.

 

3. Artificial light

 

 

 

Again, here I used a white wall as a backdrop, and mounted my speedlite on my camera to illuminate the face.

 

 

4. Diffusion (in which the light is filtered and spread through another material ie: blind, tracing paper, leaves of trees etc)
 

 

 

 

Natural filtered light (using a blind) - I prefer the top image as the sunlight wasn't as harsh as the second image, I also converted them into black and white as I thought the filtered effect through the blinds looked much better (I will keep working on this set up as I am hoping for the sunlight to appear long enough to work with and enable me to get a really pleasing image).

 

5. Sunlight

 

 

 

 

 

 

Direct sunlight in April, taken mid afternoon is a harsh unflattering light, that leaves the subject squinting with dark shadows, image 2 was taken using a reflector to the left of the subject, but appeared to make the light worse as she was almost blinded by the light bouncing back from it.

 

 6. Shade

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In another part of the garden on a bright sunny day, we found some shade, image one using natural light and image 2 used natural light and a reflector to the bottom right to bounce some light back up onto the face.

 

 7. Use of a reflector

 

 

 

 

 

 

For these images, I got my daughter to sit on the bed with the window to the left of her in the first image and then used a reflector to the right to bounce light back on her face in the second image.  As you can see the use of a reflector really does help eliminate the shadows.

 

 

http://www.lightingdiagrams.com/Creator - lighting diagram creator (ideal for adding in extra diagrams