At its simplest, photography is all about capturing light. Whether the light is direct sun, studio strobes, speedlights or candles, the key to great photography is light. Natural light such as the sun requires no great explanation – it’s softer and warmer (hue) during “golden hour” around sunrise and sunset, it’s diffuse during a bright, overcast day, and it’s hard on a clear day at noon when the sun is directly overhead. Okay, that’s simplifying things a bit, but all you have to do is look outside during the various times of day mentioned and you’ll find that you already have an intuitive knowledge of this.
Soft, warm light at Danshui, Taiwan during Golden Hour.
What about artificial light? Pick up any business magazine and look at a few of the pictures of CEOs in the features. What do they all have in common? They’re all perfectly lit. Think about this for a second. Business leaders (and politicians, celebrities etc) are busy people. They’re hardly likely to have the time to wait around until there’s a nice, bright overcast day for some soft light. In most cases, the photographer is penciled in for a ten minute time slot and has to get the shot in that time. So how do they do it? A lot of the time, they have to create the light themselves.
I’m sure that everyone has taken a photo using the built in flash on a camera, and probably seen the dreaded “red eye effect”. This occurs when the flash is on the same optical axis as the camera’s lens. The light from the flash comes too quickly for the pupil to close, and is thus reflected from the back of the eyeball. The camera records this reflection, the red color coming from melanin, a pigment in the retina. Modern cameras usually have a series of pre-flashes that cause the iris to contract, lessening the red eye effect. There are also a number of software applications that can remove red eye after the fact. However, the simplest and easiest way to avoid red eye is to separate the flash and the camera. And this takes us a few steps towards creating the kind of perfect light we see in magazines.
Off-camera flash. One light for the face, and a second low-powered light for the graffiti.
This has been the introductory article in the Learning series that is new for 2009. It will contain various tips, tricks, tutorials and explanations designed to help you become a better photographer.
