Tom Clark - Digital Photography Composition For Dummies

Soft light:You use soft light when you want to minimize details and texture, reveal smooth shapes, or produce dreamlike photographs. Use it when shooting these:

• Landscapes that are melancholy, smooth in texture, or sublime

• Fashion or portrait images that are meant to represent beauty, purity, or a pleasant image of a person

• Products with smooth shapes or reflective surfaces

• Architecture that's rounded, graceful, or flowing in shape

85mm, 1/200 sec, VII, 100

Figure 10-1:Hard light reveals texture, lines, and shape in the dunes.

50mm, 1/160 sec, V3-2, 50

Figure 10-2:Soft light often is used to portray images of beauty.

Keep in mind that sometimes images, especially landscapes, can have a mixture of hard and soft light. Using both helps to reveal different aspects of one scene.

Contrast refers to how dramatic the difference is between your highlights and shadows in a photograph. If your highlights are white and your shadows are black, you have maximum contrast in the scene. If your highlights are white and your shadows are gray, you have less contrast.

You control contrast by changing the intensity of your key light in comparison to the intensity of your fill light. The key light is a directional light source that causes shadows to be cast in the scene. The fill light is an ambient light source (meaning it causes no shadows) or a light source that comes from the same direction as the camera, which minimizes the shadows it creates. The fill light gets its name by filling in the shadows created by the key light and controlling the level of contrast.

If your key light is 1 stop brighter (or more intense) than your fill light, you end up with low contrast. The shadows are only 1 stop darker than your highlights. When you shoot on a sunny day and use the sun as your key light, you most likely have a difference of 3 stops between your highlights and your shadows. This is a high-contrast situation and is about as far as you can go without losing details in your shadows. Your digital sensor has the ability to capture highlight and shadow information within a certain range. Anything outside of that range and you lose information in one of the areas, depending on your exposure settings.

Sometimes you may want to change the lighting on the scene you're shooting so you have harder or softer light or more or less contrast. When that happens, experiment with different combinations of light qualities and contrasts to get a feel for how they look and how you could use them for different messages. Here are some example situations to get you started:

" Hard light mixed with high contrastcreates a bold and dramatic look. You can use high contrast to hide details and create a mysterious look.

• Hard light mixed with low contrastis bold but lacks drama. It can be edgy and informative at the same time.

" Soft light mixed with high contrastreveals shapes in a beautiful and dramatic way.

• Soft light mixed with low contrastproduces images of beauty that reveal shapes in a soft and dreamlike way.

In the following sections, I show you how to manipulate the quality and contrast of the light you're working with and begin to create the preceding situations.

Bring a photo assistant to help you in situations when you want to manipulate light in a scene. Because of the equipment necessary to manipulate the light, an extra pair of hands makes life much easier.

Chtmqinq the quality

When photographing a scene, the natural light you have to work with may not be exactly what you want. So, you may need to either soften the light or harden it. I explain how to do both in this section.

You have the following two options for softening natural light:

• Rely on the clouds.If a thin layer of clouds comes between your subject and the sun, your light naturally will be diffused and will spread more gradually around your subject's features. If a thick layer of clouds rolls in, however, your light will become diffused to the point that it's difficult to tell which direction it's coming from. This severe diffusion causes what's known as flat lighting. This type of lighting is considered to be boring in most situations. The exception is beauty photography. Flat light works well in this type of situation because it diminishes texture.

• Use a diffusion material.Of course, you can't always rely on the clouds to get the lighting you want. When you want to take matters into your own hands, use a diffusion material stretched out over a frame. Diffusion material typically is some sort of thin white cloth that causes light to scatter when it passes through. You place the material between your subject and the sun, usually by fixing it on a stand or enlisting an assistant to hold it. The density of the material determines how much the light is diffused: the thicker the material, the softer the light's quality.

You can purchase Scrim Jims, diffusion products made specifically for photographers, at any photography retail store. The Scrim Jim has a lightweight metal frame with removable parts that make it easy to transport. When assembled, they make hollow 6-x-6-foot squares that you can cover with diffusion materials of different densities.

If you want to shoot with hard light but the sun is behind the clouds, you can use a strobe with a bare flash bulb to take the place of the sun. These strobes are a hard light source and provide a similar quality of light as the sun. They have an advantage over the sun because you can position them however you need to. (Try doing that with the sun.) Simply place the strobe on a light stand and place it where you want it.

You can modify the quality of light produced by a strobe in the same way that you can modify the quality of the sunlight. You can purchase accessories called light modifiers that attach to the strobe. Each accessory has a different effect on the light. Common strobe modifiers include the following:

Reflectors:These are dishes that surround the back end of the flash bulb. They direct light forward into the scene rather than letting some of it spill backward away from the scene. Reflectors are ideal for creating hard, directional light.

Beauty dishes:These modifiers are similar to reflectors but larger in size. They scatter light, making it less direct. They're good for creating a slightly softer light than reflectors.

Soft boxes:You attach a soft box to the strobe so that a diffusion material is placed in front of the flash bulb and scatters the light. This modifier turns your hard light source into a soft light source. The soft box has a much larger surface area than the flash bulb. Soft boxes create a very soft light and vary in sizes. The larger the soft box, the softer the light.

Umbrellas:Lightweight and easy to transport, umbrellas create soft light by bouncing it from a larger surface back into the scene or acting like a soft box and allowing your light to pass through its material.

The two things that determine a modifier's light quality are size and diffusion density. The larger a light source, the softer the light will be. Also, the thicker the diffusion material, the softer the light will be.

Altering the contrast

If you're shooting outdoors on a sunny day and want to use the sun as your key light but want to reduce the amount of contrast, you have many options. Here are a few: