Making Sure You Are A Photographer Who Appreciates Natural Light
Equipped with a modern digital SLR many photographers learn their trade using natural light. Whether it is artificial or natural the three qualities of light are quality, quantity and colour. Many photographers would agree that the most critical component is the quality of light as this has a marked effect on the photograph. The quality of light is dictated by a number of factors and as we are dealing with available light, the biggest influence is the weather and time of day. For example cloudy and overcast days produce flat and cool toned images. The time of day influences the colour of light and the weather influences the quality.
Wedding photographers have a particularly difficult challenge with light. Venues often have very low light, mixed lighting or just not enough of it. Outdoors, there’s often bad weather to deal with and too much of the wrong light, such as overhead midday sun. Even in a static environment, light can be very varied as the photographer moves around. As a result, exposure compensation and ISO/aperture choices become prevalent in dealing with available light. Thankfully processing in RAW modes is a big bonus for dealing with the problem of colour and light. If you shoot in Jpeg, you’ll need to worry a whole lot more about colour casts and your white balance.
Dealing with low light in particular means you are going to push your technology to the limits and be forced to work within the confines of the availability in light. It is usually at this point that you really appreciate why you should have spent more on a better camera. The key reason why photographers buy expensive SLR cameras is because of the ISO ability – how high the ISO range is and how well the camera handles image noise are the major selling points for professionals. Why? Because high ISO makes the camera more sensitive to low light at higher shutter speeds – available light is no longer a major problem – just the quality of the light.
With the majority of modern photography is taken in colour, the quality of light become even more critical. Many purists of available light photography shoot in colour to later render. A Colour photograph offers plenty of scope for creating a black and white image, as different colours become adjustable as individual shades of grey.
One other trick available for available light work is to bracket a shot and create a HDR imag. The HDR combination of different exposures creates much more dynamic range in the image when combined. The down side of course, is that you would ideally use a tripod and the subjects of the scene need to remain very static to avoid blur.
Faced with the complexities of finding good quality natural light, it’s no wonder many photographers turn to flash photography – at least this puts the photographer in control of the quality and quantity of their light for predictable results.
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