Outdoor Lighting

By Steve Thomas
The Powerful Photography Coach

In this lesson you learn about the importance of proper lighting for pictures. When you take pictures of people outdoors or indoors the ways you can pose your subjects is critical to getting pictures that delight both you and your subject. In Posiing Secrets you discover how to direct your subject to poses that work.

Click Here for Posing Secrets!

This handbook provides lively, easy-to-follow discussions of the physics of light and the means of recording it digitally. Step-by-step photographic sequences reveal the profound impact that even a basic grasp of outdoor light and lighting can have on one's photographic technique. Lessons on more specialized techniques provide options for applying specific effects or lighting in a particularly challenging setting. From dealing with common problems to modifying less-than-ideal lighting to create dazzling portraits, this guide helps ensure success on every shoot..

Master Lighting Techniques for Outdoor and Location Digital Portrait Photography

This book is also available in digital format for the Amazon Kindle. I find this is an indespensible tool for carrying all the books I want with me without loading me down.

Kindle: Amazon's 6

Lighting

Lighting is a very critical part of creating powerful images and can strengthen, weaken or even destroy a picture. In this lesson I’m going to discuss the typical brightness ranges of available light situations and how to adapt your photography to the reality of the situation and how to use photographic lights to control the brightness range to a range that your photographic medium can handle.

The first thing to realize about lighting is that your eyes can see clearly over a much wider range of light levels than the best film or digital camera. On a bright, sunny day, for example you can stand in a sunny area and clearly see the brightly light area as well as into the shade of a nearby tree. However, if you were shooting slides, either the shadows would be very dark or the sunny area would be too bright and washed out. This is because typical slide film has a brightness range of approximately four f-stops from black to white. Each change of one f-stop corresponds to a factor of 2 in light level, so four f-stops from black to white is a brightness range of 16. On a bright sunny day the brightness range from open shade to a sunny location is typically 7 f-stops are a little more – which is a brightness range of 128 – no wonder it is so hard to get pictures that aren’t washed out or have areas that are too dark under such conditions. The usual situation where this will cause you trouble is when your main subject being back-light, meaning that the main source of light is from behind the subject.

Backlit subject.	Backlit suibject with fill flash

Fill flash is also useful in situations where your foreground subject is just a little too dark, as shown below. In this situation the desire was to add just enough light that the family in the foreground is easy to see but not have them look too bright compared to Yosemite Falls in the background. Your camera may have some selection for “fill flash” which, if you are a little lucky will have the desired result. If you simply have just two choices – “flash on” or “flash off” you can adjust how much the flash brightens the foreground subject by moving closer to the foreground subject to make it brighter or farther from the foreground subject to make it darker. With a digital camera you can review your pictures to see if you got a good image and then try again if it didn’t work the way you wanted it to. With film cameras I suggest that you bracket the shot by shooting three images, one where you guess it might be right, one further away (don’t back off a cliff or into traffic) and one a bit closer. For most outdoor situations the background is going to be far enough way that the light added by your fill flash won’t change the brightness of the background at all since the light spreads out and becomes weaker as it travels away from the camera – every time the distance from the camera doubles, the light level drops in half. That effect is called the “inverse square law”.

With existing light notice that the overall picture is somewhat blue and the skin tones aren't quite right. This blue coloration occurs in areas that are lit only by light coming from the blue sky with no direct sunlight.	With fill flash notice that the skin tone is correct.

Slide film is better suited to taking pictures on cloudy or overcast days where the brightness range is more in line with the capability of the film. A good digital camera can easily handle overcast days and will do almost as good as film on brightly lit days.

If you want to take powerful effective pictures you must be aware of the limitations of your medium –be it black and white film, color negative film, color slide film or digital. Black and white film delivers the widest brightness range and can be manipulated as it is being developed to get an even wider range.

Digital cameras use a device called an analog to digital converter to translate the information from the camera’s sensors into digital values. Most digital cameras use a 10 to 14-bit A/D converter, which gives them a theoretical maximum brightness range of 10-14 stops.  Unfortunately some of this range isn’t usable because the total brightness  range is limited by noise.  The fact that a digital camera has a high precision A/D converter it does not necessarily mean it can handle a larger brightness range.  In practice 5-9 stops is about all that a user can expect from a practical digital camera. The designers of high end digital cameras will pay more attention to the conversion process to maximize the effective f-stop range of the camera.

The paper a picture is printed on, the printer being used to print the picture and the display being used to view the picture are all  limiting factors in the overall process of delivering a viewable image to your eye.

Lesson 1 Subject Placement
Lesson 2 Leading Lines
Lesson 3 Light and Shadow
Lesson 4 Point of View
Lesson 5 Available Light

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(c) Steve Thomas 2007-2010 All rights reserved. This is copywrited content and may not be reproduced in any form without the express permission of the author.