It’s almost comical that Lighting, as a discussion topic, comes up this late in the order of these posts. Light is the major essential ingredient in any photograph that has ever been made. The other, of course, being a medium to record it on; film, sensor, etc.
The hang-up is that all light is not created equal. This post will introduce you to the ways that light can vary, what to look for and when to utilize different kinds of light.
The first order of business: WHITE BALANCE
We’ve been out of the conversation on how the camera functions for a number of posts, but I left out a key setting on the camera until now for a reason.
White balance is a camera setting that is not about exposure, but color.
See the image above, what color is the majority of the wall? Did you say white? Think again. What color is the page this text is written on. Well, that’s white, too, isn’t it? If they are different (that much should be obvious) which one is really white?
Our brains are good at deciphering what a color ought to be and then settling on it – for better or for worse.
I’m sure you’ve seen those optical illusions with the checkerboard and your brain thinks the two squares are different colors because one is “white” and in a shadow, and the other is “grey” but in a highlight. The fun part is when you find out they are the same exact color and your brain pulled a fast one on you. It will do the same thing for color.
See, your camera doesn’t just make (usually poor) estimations about exposure if you let it, it makes them about color as well. White balance is the setting that ensures your whites look truly white. If your white is accurate, every other color looks accurate and true – that’s why they call it white balance.
A white can either look too cool, in which case it will look blue-ish, or it can be too warm, in which case it will look orange- ish, as it does above. This is called, as the cool and warm adjectives suggest, color temperature.
The street scene above is not a particularly egregious violation of white balance, but it’s also not perfectly accurate. Could they have been someone’s artistic choice? Sure. I’m not an art critic. But you’ll never convince me it has a perfect white balance. That said, perfect white balance isn’t always what you need, but you should always be very close.
Color temperature is measured in degrees kelvin. Generally, true white is considered 5500K and the scale runs from 1500K to 9000K depending on what camera model you use. The higher the number, the bluer the image will look. That may seem strange, but remember back to your middle school science class bunsen burner: a blue flame is hotter.
There are four major ways to set your white balance accurately. The first is to put your camera on one of the “presets” for white balance. The presets are really just preset kelvin temperatures.
For example, an overcast day may look more blue than a sunny day, so setting your camera to the “cloud” setting will compensate for a bluer image by lowering the kelvin a few hundred degrees.
The second is to set your camera to kelvin and dial the number in manually. I find this to be a painful guess-and-check experience, so I don’t do it, though I know people who swear by it because it is highly controlled, which is desirable.
The third method, which many people use because cameras come from the factory this way, is to leave your camera on AWB or Auto White Balance, which, believe it or not, I will more or less endorse. These days, the camera guesses pretty well at white balance, and it’s getting better all the time.
The fourth and final way is my mode of choice. It is by far the most accurate, and though not as fast as auto, it is much faster than dialing it in manually and it is called custom white balance. Custom white balance allows you to take a picture of something white or grey around you (many photographers bring a grey card with them in their bag for this purpose) and then use the information from that image to let your camera automatically compensate from then on. You’re basically telling your camera, make this right, and it does, and everything else falls in line beautifully.
The biggest challenge with color temperature that photographers face is called color casting. Color casting occurs when you’re in a room with different kinds of light – like a halogen lamp which is ferociously warm-to-the-point-of-looking- orange next to an open window that lets in cooler light. Or even as something as two lightbulbs that put out different whites. Both will affect your subject and your photos will come out looking poorly colored. My solution in this scenario is to turn off the lights that don’t balance because the outside is out of my control. Is it darker? Sure, but if I put my back to the light, everything works out fine with a wide aperture and a camera with good noise control in high ISO values.
White balance can be a challenge at first, but it is an absolutely essential skill. A nailed white balance is a sure sign of a professional.
Next up in this discussion is the matter of TONES.
We don’t see rays of light, light reveals itself by what it falls on and how it reflects back to our eyes. Sometimes we think we see a ray of light, but it is not the light that we see, it is something that we didn’t previously see being illuminated, be it dust in the air, a mist or a fog.
Seen above, some “rays of light” are defined. They are defined by areas where they aren’t, by contrast. The light appears to be being picked up by haze in the air in some places and not in others. This is because of shadows. The haze isn’t only present in some places and not others, the intense light is, and that gives the illusion of rays.
These tones are defined in three major categories: shadows, mid-tones, and highlights.
Shadows, just like you might think, are the areas where light is not reaching so well. I don’t mean that shadows are all black with no light at all. Think of your shadow on pavement, you can still see the pavement, it’s just darker than the pavement around it that’s not in shadow.
Mid-tones are somewhere between white and black, they are near to being neither. Most images are heavy in the mid-tones, and that’s not a bad thing. Usually, mid-tones are what we would consider “well lit.” In other words, it is easy to see everything. See below – though you could probably pick out some highlights, where are the shadows on the owl? It may be hard to tell, they are so subtle. There are a lot of mid-tones. The image below is very pleasing, but it isn’t high- contrast or dramatic, like I would say for the image of the trees on the previous page, because there aren’t many shadows.
Highlights are the brighter areas of an image. The flowers in the owl picture, both the ones in the foreground as well as the bokeh, are highlights. Some of them, in both areas, are what we call “blown out,” meaning they have been overexposed to the point of losing detail. If you blow out highlights, it is near impossible to get them back through editing. It is far easier to brighten a dark shadow than to fix a blown highlight because the information just isn’t there.
Blown or not, the flowers are still considered highlights, and so are the spots of the owl and around the eyes of the owl as well.
Simply, shadows are closer to black, highlights are closer to white, and the rest that falls in the middle is mid-tone. There aren’t laws on at what point a mid-tone becomes a shadow, but I would advise you to keep the concepts of contrast from the last post in mind. We usually define them by what their context is. That in mind, I don’t consider the owl’s pupils to be in shadow, they are black because they are black, not because they are insufficiently lit.
There is one particular kind of highlight called specular highlight. Specular highlights are very small points of bright white reflection that offer us some insight on shape or texture of an object.
Consider the flower below. Almost every droplet of water has a little white speck on it – some have a lot of it. Those white specks are called specular highlights and show up on all kinds of reflective materials. They make metals look metallic, and they make glass look glassy. The Jamaicans have a saying, “wi likkle but tallawah,” which means we are small (meaning geographically in their case) but powerful. Specular highlights live by that principle. If you took them out, the picture would look unrealistic. The reason that is true is because we see these all around us every day and do not notice. Their absence makes us wrinkle our noses, even if we don’t know why. Try it. If you take an image with some good specular highlights and photoshop them out, you’ll see what I mean.
One very useful thing that specular highlights can be used for, though its difficult in the image of the flower, is deconstructing an image to find out where the light source is coming from. Look back to our owl friend. He has a subtle specular highlight in his eyes. When they are in the eyes, specular highlights are called catch lights.
The owl’s catch lights tell us that he is being lit from above because his eye is round and the specular highlight occurs on the top half of it. We can deduce with a fair amount of probability that he is being lit by the sky because of its position and size. Take my photoshop challenge, remove someone’s catch lights. They’ll look dead-ish to you, I’m serious!
Shadows, mid-tones, and highlights are how we describe the light around us, and how they manifest themselves depends on multiple factors, the first of which we’ll treat is the source of light.
LIGHT SOURCES:
What is the light in the above image coming from? Stop and look! If you said a car’s headlights, you are correct! How do I know for sure? Well, I don’t because I didn’t take this image personally, but the fact that the light is brightest in a horizontal strip in the middle and there are tire tracks in the snow that point directly to the light source are enough of an indicator for me.
There are many, many light sources, but I want to file them all into two main categories.
Light is either ambient, or artificial light.
Ambient light is light that is around and available. The sun? Ambient light. The lamp in your room? Ambient. A Candle? Ambient. What makes light ambient is simply that it has not been put there by you for the purpose of lighting, but it happens to act as a light for you.
Artificial light is light that is put there by a photographer. Flash is the most common kind of artificial light, but as you can see in the silhouetted lovers in the snow, car headlights can be an effective artificial light source as well. Many light sources can be made artificial. If a desk lamp is in the room, it’s ambient. If you move it for aesthetic improvement, it becomes artificial.
There’s nothing wrong with artificial lighting, actually, I think it’s a sign of intelligence. When photographers begin in the industry, many claim to be “ambient light” or “natural light” photographers. Not to generalize, but in my experience what that means is that it is quite possible they don’t know how to manipulate light, only react to it. This was a pivotal point in my development as a photographer – if a light will be more effective moved, move it. Don’t be a victim of circumstance, change your circumstances to benefit your shot every chance you get. Of course, you don’t always have that option, but when you do, take it.
The terms ambient and artificial light are ways of describing where light is coming from; light sources. How light looks when it gets to a subject is a different subject entirely, one we’ll look at next.
The first key to light sources is simply to recognize them. The hardest part about photography for most people is to learn to see something as basic as light in ways you’ve never seen it before. Light is all around us every day. We don’t customarily think in terms of shadows and highlights, but learning to see light differently is essential, and the place to start is understanding the source.
Despite funneling all light into two categories for this section, we must expand. Within these definitions, the way light looks and acts can vary quite a bit. It is imperative that a photographer have a repertoire of knowing how to use the lights he has available to him, whether they are ambient or not.
Light sources, of course, create shadow. See the image above. Every guard rail is projecting a fence-like shadow on the unit next door. I can only imagine this subject was lit by the sun for two reasons. One, this is a huge subject, and would need huge lights to light consistently, and two the shadows are very defined. Keep in mind light only travels in straight lines.
When light lands on a subject, a few details about the source will determine what the surface of that subject will look like. The image above is an example of hard light.
Hard light gets its name from the definition of the shadow areas. Looking at maybe one of those fence shapes, we would say the transition from shadow to highlight is very abrupt, very hard. The shape of the shadow is very defined. Hard light is created by small light sources.
But wait, didn’t I say this was lit by the sun? Why yes, yes I did. Isn’t the sun so large that 1.3 million Earths could fit inside it? Yes, yes it is. The illusion of a contradiction here lies in the reality of size vs the perception of size.
Just because something is large, doesn’t mean we always perceive it as large. Standing next to Shaquille O’Neal would lead you to believe he is quite large, at least relative to you. If you were spying on him with binoculars, he would look quite a bit smaller, at least small enough to fit inside your binoculars.
Perception of size (perception is reality in photography) is relative to distance. Do this experiment. Hold up your thumb an inch in front of your eye. What does it obstruct you from seeing? Probably quite a bit. Now hold it at arm’s length. It hides very little. Your thumb has not changed, but your perception of size has. We call it depth perception. It’s how we walk up stairs without falling, or kick a ball; things that are closer to us appear bigger so we know where they are relatively.
So the sun may be very big, but it is also quite, quite far away. The distance makes us perceive it to be small. Ever look at the sun through a welder’s mask? It looks to be about an inch wide or so. The sun, unlike Shaq, also happens to be a light source, so it is the distance that makes it act, or be perceived like a small light source.
The opposite of hard light is, as you might expect, soft light, and it is the opposite: the transition between shadows and highlights is very gradual, very soft. Soft light comes from large (or perceived as large!) light sources.
Let me throw you a curve. Look at the image above – is there hard or soft light? If you looked at the highlights hitting the floor from the light coming through the window and said hard, you would be correct. If you looked at the gradual change on the ceiling and said soft, you would also be right. If you looked at either and said the opposite, re-read the last few paragraphs, you’ve fallen off the wagon.
Why do both kinds of light appear here? Think about it this way: What is the source of light that is hitting the floor? The sun. The sun, previously established, is a small light source. What is lighting the ceiling? Not the sun, it is the floor.
Well, I guess technically it’s still the sun, but the light is reaching the ceiling by way of the floor. The floor has become the pseudo-source (not a technical term). The floor is much closer to the ceiling than the sun is to the floor, so the part of the floor that is reflecting, as a light source, is a much bigger source than the sun. Everything is relative to distance. Because it is close to its subject, it is a large light source, and the ceiling has soft light and gradual shadows as a result.
This is fun, let’s do another. The image below, hard (no, not boiled) or soft? Again we see both. I’ll use times of the clock to identify eggs here.
The egg at the 3:00 position clearly has a hard shadow right down the left-middle. The middle yolk has a decently hard shadow, too. However, the egg at 8:00 seems to have a very soft shadow on it. Why? There are two light sources on the same subject here. The first source is the light that’s lighting everything, and we know it’s hard (meaning: small, far away, or both). The second source is the bottom egg at 6:00. Because it is white, it reflects light back on the egg at 8:00 and softens the shadow on it as a result.
So what’s better, hard light or soft light? Most people gravitate toward soft light. Truthfully, they both have important applications. Because hard light transitions into shadow quickly, it tends to reveal texture far better than soft light, especially at low angles. This could be a good thing, say you’re a baker and you sell a loaf of bread with an amazing crust.You want your crust to look crusty in a picture, so some texture will be of great importance to you. The down-side of this effect happens when hard-light is used poorly on people. Because shadows happen fairly easily (even the texture of the surface of the egg is revealed near the hard shadow on our bottom egg at 5:00), hard light makes wrinkles seem to appear out of nowhere.
Usually, the people I am photographing are looking to minimize the appearance of wrinkles. Either I am perpetually working for very vain, picky people, or nobody wants to look old. I’ll bet on the latter. Remember: soft light looks better on people, generally speaking, and hard light is good for bringing out texture.
As with many photography concepts in this site, every technique I’m sharing with you is part of a repertoire, an arsenal of weapons, a tool in the tool belt. A chef knows which knife to use when he is cooking dinner, a photographer should know the same – how to use every tool and have the wisdom to know when to use what.
It is common for me to walk into a photo shoot with a variety of conditions; meaning I don’t really know what I’ll have to work with until I’m there, and even after I arrive, the situation may change. Being ready for anything is very enjoyable when you’re comfortable with your skill set. Learning about light will set your work and ability apart from others.
Practicing seeing light in a new way, that is, looking for shadows and highlights, or hard light and soft light everywhere you go, will help you grow in your ability to photograph it. When you see interesting light, use it, and if you can’t find it, make it.
Another great way to Draw greater attention: Use MOTION & POV in your images.
**If you’re interested in treating these posts as a self-study with assignments, you can get our Assignment Series 1 question pack to help you learn these ideas through real, targeted, hands-on practice. The Assignment Series 1 question pack is included with enrollment in our beginner’s course.**
