Photography Tutorials part 4 - Playing with Light

Understanding the light around us is a very crucial step in photography. For if there was no light, there would be no photography.  Controlling the amount or color of light while shooting, requires special attention as light plays a major role contributing to the overall appeal of the image.



First lets start with "Seeing" the light around us and them move on to different techniques of light photography. The key to understand light is to observe our natural source of lighting, the sun. For most of us who do not own studio equipments such as spot lights or studio lights, taking great pictures is usually done understanding the sunlight. One must understand that the color temperature and intensity of sunlight varies throughout the day. Learn to see how the natural abundant light bounces through each material, the reflectivity and the bloom or the harshness.

Try observing a place well known to you, it could be your own house corridor, or maybe that park by the lake you always visit. Observe how by each passing hour, the color or intensity of light falling in that particular area changes. The same place looks very different at the different times of the day.

Portrait photography at home without studio lights:
A portrait usually involves framing a person's upper half and striving to capture the facial features, the emotion in a person's face filling up the frame. The lighting needs to be soft and even, making sure that all of the facial features and spaces are well lit unless left darkened intentionally. Studios often use spot lights with diffuse filters that casts a warm soft light on the person. But when we are going to be shooting without an actual studio, we must make use of the available light. Shooting a portrait pic in early morning hours, (like the one here that i shot) and late afternoons ensures that the sunlight is bright enough to illuminate the subject completely but does not cast harsh shadows. Avoid shooting in hot mid day sunlight as there would be harsh shadows being cast on the subject. If any circumstance requires you to shoot during mid day or under harsh sunlight, you can use the camera's inbuilt flash with a homemade flash diffuser to brighten up the shadowed area. yes, its completely fine to use flash in sunlight and nobody's gonna mock you for that. Sometimes these harsh sunlight casts very strange and abstract shadows when it undergoes multiple bounce offs from objects. These could be great subjects to be captured too! :)

Light Painting: 
As you start to feel comfortable with learning to read light around you, why not use some cool techniques to create pictures of light themselves! Say hello to light painting. These techniques have been around for ages and I'm sure you must have come across hundreds of them already. It involves setting your camera to a slow shutter speed and "painting" or playing around with light infront of the camera sensor to create some really nice images like the ones here.