Monday, April 29, 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 want a well lit picture but can't produce it, it can be tremendously hard. This can include situations like shooting speedy motion indoors, without the subject being too blurred. This is nearly unworkable so we then use additional lighting sources to help us get more light so we can speed up the shutter. We speed up the shutter so we don't photograph any blur. In a case like this we might use the light from the flash, utilise a higher ISO to make the camera more sensitive to light or employ other light sources.

On saying this however, from time to time you will not like a bright picture. At times you might want to make something somewhat moody and intense, or on the other hand, gentle and romantic. This may require dim or very little light. You can still get good pictures with a low intensity of light.

Many wedding photographs are used with very soft lighting. It makes the story and complete shot look gentle. Light from a window is an example of how lighting that can accomplish this. There are other ways to shoot lovely photos using very little light. I've done it many times. It takes time but soon you will know lighting and be able to create the mood and feeling you require.

You don't always have to photograph people when shooting with diffused light. You can place an emphasis on the outline of an object. You might only want to highlight 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 shot my husband's fingers. He was in his studio drawing up measurements for his next painting. As I noticed his hands move smoothly over the canvas I couldn't help thinking how lovely the light was. It cast a soft and warm light over the entire room. I wanted to capture the gentleness of the movement, by preserving the lighting on certain components of the image and not others.




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