Pixiq

Oh, the horror, the horror! That’s my reaction to the misuse of light I see in most photographs. That’s why I’m writing these posts on light to hopefully help photographers deal with light more intelligently. I’m fighting against lazy photographers too. You know the ones that won’t take five steps to get closer to a subject but have to use their zoom lens instead. When it comes to light it’s like, “Light? Bah, I’m standing here I’m not going to move just because the lights better over there." If you are going to be a good photographer then as they say in the old spiritual baby, "You Gotta Move."

I've presented two important aspects of light so far, Quality and Color now let's move on to the direction of light.

All light comes from somewhere, be it over there or over there. The one exception is heavy fog but hello we’re not talking about fog shots here. It seems a simple concept but as with the other aspects of light it is far more complex and potent than it would appear at first glance.

To understand the direction of light and its effects you have to imagine two big circles around your head. One is vertical, looping straight up and down, the other horizontal circling your head at eye level.

In the vertical plane or loop most of the time light comes from the top half of the circle. It is the natural position for light in our world from the sun to house lights. When the light source is directly overhead it is called a “top light” and it is notable because all the shadows fall below an object’s features. It's less interesting than light coming in from elsewhere in the vertical loop.

We light naturally to be coming from above us, when it's coming from the bottom of the loop it's unnatural and is useful mostly in horror movies (check out the mummy shot in the gallery) and badly done product shots  This is “under lighting” and needs to be used very carefully or not at all. That’s pretty much light in the vertical plane. The top half of the circle is natural, the bottom not so much.

The real action is in the horizontal plane. When the light source is directly in front of the subject—pointing right into your eyes in my example—the subject is said to be “front lit.” Move the light 180˚ around so it is behind your head and now it is a back light and the subject is “back lit.” When the light is placed to either the left or right of the subject—pointing at your ears—it is a side light and the subject is “side lit,” simple enough so far.

Light in the horizontal plane produces texture. We see texture because of shadowing. Shadows tell us about the three dimensionality of an object and help us determine its size relative to other elements in the picture. When a subject is front lit the shadows are thrown backwards and can’t be seen. This flattens a subject. Front lighting is flat lighting. It’s bad because we lose texture but it’s good for some special circumstances. The old Hollywood studio photographers loved to use this flat frontal light for their glamour shots of female movie stars. It did away with a lot of their wrinkles and creases and made their skin glow. It’s the way I shot the model by the pool. She’s looking up into the sun and her face is front lit.

Side light controls shadows and as you move the light around from the front to one side or the other the shadow lengthen. We use extreme side light positions when we want to emphasize texture. A portrait taken with a single floodlight to the one side of a subject shows a lot of contrast. One side of the face is brightly lit the other is in dark shadow. But it has its uses as those Hollywood studio shooters knew when they used strong sidelight to make Cagney and other movie bad guys look rougher and meaner. Shoot a street scene late in the afternoon with a strong side light from the setting sun and you get something very dramatic, almost “film noir” in its high contrast.

In a photo studio two lights or more are used to control the contrast range and thus the textures in the photo. The main light is placed to one side of the subject and once the texture is established a second light is used to soften the shadows for further control. We need the second light to make up for the way our eyes look into the shadows and adjust for them by seeing them as lighter than they are.  

Similarly I used a hand held flash to soften shadows in the model by the pool shot. Look closely and you can see that the sun was overhead. The model is looking up and I used the flash to soften the shadows on her left side.

In most photography you want the light source to come 45˚ above the horizontal and more or less midway between front and side positions.

Which reminds me of a pet peeve of mine, when I lived on the East Coast of Florida I’d often go to the beach Gulf beaches at sunset and it would make me crazy to see people line up their families to take photos of them against the setting sun. Most of the time they never even used the weak built in flashes in their cameras and most of the time the photos I knew were dark unrecognizable figures against a red sky. A disaster.

On the beach you could tell the professionals because they always had big battery powered portable flashes on light stands and large reflectors set up around the people they were shooting. For me, back lighting is something you don’t do unless you really know what you are doing.

Which brings me to the final aspect of light: Quantity or how much light is there in a scene? Light has a pretty big range of quantity from a single candle to the brilliance of a noon day sun. It’s the easiest aspect of light to judge with our naked eyes.

In terms of using the quantity of light this is another place where you need to out think your camera’s auto system. Sometimes scenes are bright and you want to capture that brightness while other times the scene is dark and dimly lit and you want to be able to capture too. Auto exposure systems average the light in a scene and try to make everything flat and a uniform middle gray. That means a photo of a couple taken in candle light will be washed out and too bright. Learn to use your camera’s Exposure Compensation control to overexpose scenes full of light colors and tones and to underexpose dark scenes.

And now for a commercial announcement: For any of you interested in more about capturing and using light please take a look at my book “Capture the Light” (Lark Book 2008) available at Barnes and Noble, Amazon and other fine bookstores all over the place. It’s cheap and covers this material in much greater detail