Understanding Light for Photography

It seems like a simple concept, but surprisingly one of the most basic understandings that will immediately improve the way you take photographs is the understanding of light and the direction its coming from.

A common mistake many photographers make is to put their subjects in front of a light source. You often see this during a beautiful sunset with beautiful, saturated colors. The natural tendency is to want to take a picture with this beautiful light in the background. The problem is that since the light is coming from behind the subject, the subject is in a dark shadow. Compounding this is the amount of light your camera is capable of detecting. The human eye can observe and see a very wide range of light. We can see many details in shadows and highlights - and our eyes can rapidly adjust for lighting conditions. Cameras on the other hand (particularly digital cameras) have a very narrow range of light that is recorded. It's enough to make great photographs, but in the case of that great sunset - the subject in the shadows will be too dark to get any details from. The subject will be a black silhouette against a beautiful sky.

There are several solutions to getting a picture like this to work. The best thing to do is to turn on your camera's flash mode to "fill flash". This will pop the camera's flash at the end of the exposure just in time to light up the face of the person you're shooting a picture of. You'll still have the great sunset.

If you don't have a flash, you can try some more artistic options such as posing the silhouette in an interesting way. Or better yet, just turn your subject around and allow that beautifully colored sunset light their face and hair. They will look stunning. Other options to consider are playing with your composition to try and get both the sunset and the subjects face. This can be done by moving in closer and shooting your subject at a 45 degree angle with the sunset near the back at an opposite 45 degree angle.

There are many options you can try with just a simple point and shoot camera. However if you are using something a little more robust such as a DSLR there are additional options that you could explore with off camera flash units.

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