Monday 8 April 2013

Photography Lighting Techniques To Help You Get Stunning Photos

By Amy Renfrey


Lighting tells us lots of special things. It shows us whether the environment is trustworthy or not. It tells us whether or not we can believe our surroundings.There is a good reason children are fearful of the dark, and this essay shows that we have never truly grown out of that. Though, not all images with strong shadow areas capture this feeling of trepidation. The truth is based on the way we set up the image, and photograph it, we can actually generate something really fascinating.

Light also has an influence on tone, texture, vibrancy and our background environment. We can be in charge of our lighting in many ways; f-stop, shutter speed, using the flash, fine tuning the intensity of the flash unit, using supplementary lighting sources, using an individual lighting source, making use of filters, affecting our photos in Photoshop, moving a person from a dark space to a window and many more things. It's very important to work well with light because it assists you to you tell your story. And story telling is what taking photos is all about.

When you require a well lit shot but can't produce it, it can be tremendously tricky. This can incorporate situations like shooting quick motion indoors, without the subject being too out of focus. This is nearly impossible so we then use additional lighting options to assist us get extra light so we may speed up the shutter. We speed up the shutter so we do not capture any blur. In a case like this we could use the speedlite, use a higher ISO to make the camera more sensitive to light or make use of other lighting sources.

On saying that though, now and then you may not want a bright picture. At times you may want to make something entirely moody and intense, or alternatively, subdued and romantic. This may demand soft or very little light. You can still get lovely pictures with a small amount of light.

Many wedding and portrait photos are used with quite soft light. It makes the story and overall image look gentle. Window light is an illustration of how light that can do this. There are other ways to capture lovely photos using a small amount of light. I've done it lots of times. It takes time but before long you will appreciate lighting and be able to create the mood and feeling you wish for.

You don't always have to capture people when using soft light. You can place an emphasis on the outline of an object. You could only want to emphasise certain things and not others. Let's take a look at an example of a photo I took with this exact theme in mind.

Canon 5D, F5.6, 1/250th of a second, ISO 4000, 105mm.

In this photo here I photographed my husband's fingers. He was in his art studio drawing up measurements for his next painting. As I noticed his hands move smoothly over the canvas I couldn't help noticing how beautiful the light was. It cast a gentle and warm light over the entire space. I sought to capture the softness of the action, by preserving the lighting on particular components of the image and not others.




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