Wednesday 29 May 2013

How Low Light Can Create The Most Beautiful Photos

By Amy Renfrey


Light tells us a lot of special things. It tells us whether the environment is safe or not. It tells us whether or not we can trust our environment.There is a good reason kids are fearful of the dark, and this exercise shows that we have never truly moved out of that. But, not all photos with intense shadow capture this feeling of alarm. In actual fact depending on the way we create the image, and photograph it, we can really capture something quite interesting.

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 that though, now and then you will not need a well lit picture. At times you might want to create something really moody and intense, or on the other hand, gentle and romantic. This may demand dim or little or a very small amount of lighting. You can still get excellent images with a small amount 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 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 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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