A Tutorial On Lighting – How To Make Your Pictures Look Great

There are two ways of lighting your photography: with natural light or with artificial light (a flash). Yet how you control your light source can be handled in a bunch of different ways. That’s the focus of this Tutorial On Lighting.

Natural lighting means using what surrounds you. If you’re outside, it’s using the sun as your light source. Yet there’s a big difference between using natural light in a cloudy, rainy location, and using natural light on a bright sunny afternoon. Both provide a light source, yet both may need different types of manipulation.

Soft Light
Soft lighting is defused and gives you soft shadows throughout your photograph. It’s using indirect lighting from the source. On a cloudy day, think of the skies as your soft box. The sunlight is still streaming down to earth, yet its diffused by the clouds, giving you wonderful soft lighting.

Hard Light
If you’ve ever tried to take a portrait in the middle of a bright sunny day, you know the difficulty of shooting in hard light. Sunlight provides intense light from one source, and creates hot spots throughout your photograph. With hard light and people, you’ll also face photographing with squinting eyes, and uncomfortable looks. The two ways of modifying hard light is through using a diffuser or a reflector.

Diffusing Light
In order to diffuse the light source, you need reduce the power has on your subject as much as possible. Obviously the larger the area covered within the photograph, the larger the diffuser. If you are shooting with sunlight streaming through a window, you can diffuse the light by placing a translucent cover over the window – white paper or cloth will work. If you’re outside, a large reflector made from white translucent material will allow you to direct and diffuse the sunlight falling on your subject.

Reflecting Light
Reflectors can be made from a variety of fabrics and colors. The purpose of a reflector is to change the direction of the lighting source, and use it to your advantage. Light always travels in a straight line. With a reflector, the light source is bounced back onto the subject in softer shades. Reflectors are generally made from white, silver and gold fabrics, with the silver and gold used more for reflecting and white used for diffusing. It is possible to use both at once, diffusing the harshness of the light source coming in, and bouncing it back with a reflector to capture highlights.

While natural lighting is great, there are certain times when it’s virtually impossible to use it in your photographs. Try taking a photograph in a dark room – you simply won’t get much without an artificial light source.

Constant Light
Constant light sources are a part of our everyday living. Your kitchen lighting may provide ample light for the photographs you are trying to create. However, with a constant light source, you are stuck with the location of the light source. You can’t remove overhead lighting and take it with you. It takes on a “what you see is what you get” philosophy. The other drawback is most constant light sources simply don’t provide enough light to capture top quality images. In order to compensate, you either have to decrease the shutter speed, or use a lower your depth of field.

Flash Light
Using flash in your photography can allow you to highlight anything you choose. The simplest way is to use on camera flash, yet you also have the option of working with a variety of lighting sources. Multiple flash units, used in conjunction with lightboxes, reflectors and diffusers, can allow you to imitate the sun in any condition, and have total control over how things will be lit.

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