In my last post, I talked about lighting and the best times of the day to take pictures. I left you with the question, “But what do you do if you have to take a picture at a time of day that is not ideal?” I’m glad you asked, because sometimes you can’t help when you need to take a photo. You can’t ignore that once in a lifetime shot just because it’s 12:35 p.m. So, what do you do?
You work with the light that you have available, and retouch if necessary in a photo-editing program. If the light is not ideal, but the subject matter is awesome, take the shot and worry about the details later. Unless you have a photo that is totally over-exposed, you can make adjustments so it will be printable.
For 35mm film, if you have the detail in the negative, you can usually make a decent print from the negative. The same is true for digital. You have to capture the details of the scene to be able to make an acceptable print.
I said that you work with the light that is available in a situation where the lighting isn’t the greatest. This includes artificial light that you may have available, such as an on-camera flash. Like a tripod, I would recommend using flash for outdoor photos, especially of people. This is known as “fill-flash”, since it is used to fill in the areas of shadow that are always present to some degree in photos taken outside.
Fill flash is especially important in cases where you have strong backlighting. Backlighting is what you see on many TV shows, where you see people’s hair appear to light up. This is caused by light being focused on the actor from behind and above them. It is very much overused in TV and the movies, but it is a nice touch in a natural light portrait. (By the way, natural light is sunlight, and artificial light is everything else; like strobes, flash, and fluorescent lighting).
To use fill flash, you used to have to fake your camera’s light meter out by adjusting the camera to make it think there was less light behind your subject than there really was. With a digital camera, you may have a setting that takes backlighting into account. If you have a setting called “back light”, use it in this situation.
My digital point and shoot camera has settings for: party/indoor, beach/snow, sunset, dusk/dawn, night landscape, close up, museum, fireworks show, copy, and back light.
These are some of the tricky lighting situations that you may encounter when taking pictures. The makers of digital cameras that have auto everything knew that, so they came up with some settings to allow you more control over the lighting in these instances. Check your camera’s manual to see what you have available to you.
I will also cover the basics of lighting from the perspective of someone using a manual everything camera, so that you learn about lighting a subject properly. I think it’s important to know, and it will help improve your photography no matter what stage or ability level you are at. Keep checking this blog for more helpful photography advice…