Light is the magical stuff that we use to create our pictures. It's found all
around us and comes from a variety of sources both natural and man-made.
It also comes in many forms and colours, each one affecting the atmosphere of our
pictures differently. To help us understand light I've broken it down
into four main categories: transmitted light, reflected light, soft light and
hard light.
Hard light comes from any light source that is apparently small.
Now the sun on a clear day is a prime example. Now we know the sun's not
actually small but it appears small because it's so far away and it acts
like an extremely bright but small light bulb in the sky. Soft light comes from
any light source that has a large apparent surface area. Now a great
example of that is like the light we've got right now and that's where the sun
is shining through an overcast sky or a large blanket of cloud and that large
blanket of cloud has now become the large light source and that large light
source is what's giving us the soft light. The characteristics of hard light
are that it has a very high contrast because that high contrast it gives very
sharp hard-edged shadows. It also has a certain sparkle and sharpness to the
light because of the high contrast and it also reveals texture very strongly if
the light source is at the right angle, whereas soft light is very low in
contrast and hardly gives any shadows at all.
In actual fact if soft light is used incorrectly it can look quite dull.
So what type of light is best for photography? Well right now is what
photographers call the 'Magic Hour' and that's because it has all the magic
ingredients. We've got soft light from this large light source above us which
is the sky, but we've also got hard light from the sun which is setting over there
and it's cutting through the earth's atmosphere so it's reduced in intensity
to a much more manageable level and by combining hard light and soft light
makes the photographs much more interesting. Now to add to that we've
also got transmitted light and that means we can see the light source in the
picture, plus we've got reflected light reflecting off the surface of the water
and off the wet sand and by putting all of those things together we're going to
get a fantastic image, and if I can just get this piece of driftwood to stay
still I think we're going to get the shot that we want. That's coming together
really nicely, just going to move that over a little bit. Some beautiful
reflections off of the bit of wood, it's a little bit too close, just going to
move it back down there. I want to be quite precise.Oh no, she moved out the
way again! Oh still that's quite a good result quite, a good result. We've got the
water flowing by, got the bit of wood.
As you can see sometimes you need to get your feet wet to get the best shot.
For this shot I was using a super wide angle lens and experimenting in manual
mode with shutter speeds from one to six seconds.
I used a small aperture for maximum depth of field. To balance the light in
the sky with my dark foreground I use ND filters, which we look at in depth in our
travel and landscape DVD. To understand light better start looking at it in
different situations and try to figure out what you are seeing - is it hard light
or is it soft light or is it a combination of the two? For the best
light try to shoot at least half an hour before and after sunset, if the weather
conditions are right then this will usually be the most attractive light of the day.
We'll try a couple more shots before we pack home and I can change out of these wet
socks and shoes.
Fantastic!
The 'Magic Hour' is not the only time or light that we can shoot in. You can even
take advantage of hard light at midday by shooting indoors. I'm going to show
you how you can create stunning portraits with nothing more than a
window and a reflector for lighting. Now a great lighting set-up that you can easily
use in many different locations, even in your own home, is simply a large window.
Now here we've got Vicky modelling for us and we're using this large window light
to illuminate soft light all the way down the side of Vicky's face. Now one of
the problems when you just have side light like this is that the other side of the
body will be in shadow, now a great way to get around that is simply to use a
reflector and reflectors are great tools, now you can get a variety of different
reflectors. This one here is a commercially available reflector that
just pops open like that and you can take out on location with you and then
if you look at Vicky's face here you'll see the difference that that reflector
makes as I put that light in and out of the shot like so, so a huge difference. Now
it's silver on one side and it's white on the other so the silver side gives a
harsher light, but if you don't want to use a reflector like that you can even
use something as simple as a piece of white card like this, here I've got a
little bit of white board, just a bit of white foam board, and again watch the
result here what we can do there. So this side of the face is dark and in shadow,
simply bring white board in and we've got a great reflector, great fill in
panel to illuminate that shadow side for us. So very simple technique - large window,
nice soft light beautiful for portraits, fantastic for portraits, and then simply
a reflector on the other side to fill in the shadow side. So I'm going to get
Vicky leaning in against this window and then we're going to use a couple of
different reflectors and we're going to see what results we get.
Okay Vicky.
That's great, come down towards me a bit more.
And head over the other way, that's it.
This shot uses a white reflector close to our subject, here the reflector is
further away resulting in less fill light and more shadows. In this shot no
reflector was used at all, and in this shot the white reflector was close to
our model.
That's good.
Great. Okay just give me a little hint of a smile there Vicky, that's good.
Just chuck that light there, perfect. Same pose, that's it.
The difference without
the reflector and then with the reflector, without, with. And you can see
that even without the reflector can be quite nice, in that case there's actually
a little bit of light bouncing back from the other side of the room anyway which
is filling in a little bit and then on the one with the reflector it's almost a
bit too strong so I think what we do Fab is just get you to go in with the
white card this time, we'll just go from a little bit further away. Much softer
light, which is fantastic for filling in all those creases on Vicky's face.
That's it good, okay, excellent. I'm just going to drop that down a little bit.
Okay turn your head towards the window Vicky, that's it good keep that there.
That's lovely. You can see from this that the surgeon
is going to have to do the reconstructive work round about here and then
probably shrink the nose a little bit, expand the head, lift
those out, yeah lift those out,
maybe make your fingers longer, so they they drag on the floor
like an orangutan,
which would probably suit you quite well but yeah.
So I think it's worked out quite nicely.
For the picture on the left we used a
white reflector from approximately two meters away, giving a slight fill to the
shadow side of our image.
For the shot on the right the reflector was moved
further away, resulting in a stronger shadow.
Notice how in both shots I have used a large aperture to blur the background,
concentrating the attention on our subject