Lighting Up Your Pictures

Before you even took on photography, you know that light plays a major role in your pictures. How you use the light will either wow your viewers or get them to question your skills. Both the compact digital camera and professional DSLR camera are able to take picture automatically with optimize lighting. This is done by the built in meter which measures the amount light reflected to the camera.

Then, is that all you can do with lighting? If that is all, you can call me whatever you want for starting this post. You can now look into the angle of light.

Know that shadow add marvelous effect to your picture and you can control the kind of shadow you want with different angle of light. The simplest thing you can do with the angle of light is to create a silhouette of your subject. Let’s imagine that the sun is setting in front of you and your subject is looking at you. When you take the picture at this moment, your subject will appear to be a black silhouette that is underexposed.

Besides, exposing your subject with lighting from the left or right will create different feeling to the picture and this often seen in portrait photography. That is probably why sometime you hear people say my left face looks better than my right. :-)

Although you can play with lighting from almost all angles, beware of light shining directly to your subject because this will overexpose your subject. If this is the case you can either you can block the light source or flash on your subject. However, you can only so much flashing your subject under this kind of condition because you can still see the artificial light on your subject. This is even worst when your subject is a person with oily face or heavy make up. If you can try to disperse your flash or step further from your subject.

I am always amazed of some photographers who can get the ray of light in their picture. I have tried to do it but I am not sure whether it is my poor skill (I was told you can do this with very slow shutter speed and narrow aperture) or my timing, the pictures I took are disasters. Don't you feel great when you capture ray of light penetrating the clouds or light pouring from the glass roof? When you can do that, it definitely signify that you have move up another level for digital photography. I sure want to reach that level ASAP.

Have fun photographing,

Michael Wong. :-)

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