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9 Book Excerpts - Creative Lighting Tips And Techniques
October 30, 2011
The following excerpt is from a wonderful new digital photography book, Creative Lighting: Digital Photography Tips and Techniques by award-winning professional photographer
Harold Davis.
The book covers both natural light and studio lighting. However, it is not a cookbook covering studio lighting setups; nor is it a book that emphasizes the pixels over the overall visual impact that a photograph can make.
Each of the photos in Creative Lighting can be used to generate ideas for your own work — how you can use existing light, alter light, or create lighting to make spectacular photos of your own. The author includes the story behind each photo in the book, as well as full technical data about the captures.
Understanding Exposure
To make a photo, light enters through a camera’s lens and proceeds to hit the sensor. From the viewpoint of the camera—and the photographer—the exposure settings used by the camera translate this incoming rush of light via hardware and software into a file that can be viewed or printed.
If the exposure settings are wrong, the resulting photo may not be usable. Extreme overexposure—where the camera’s controls are set to allow in too much light—will produce an all-white photo without any details. At the other extreme, very underexposed photos haven’t let enough light in to the sensor—and there’s no detail to be seen because the image is all black.
When there is detail to be seen in a photo, the exposure settings control how the incoming light is rendered. In other words, unless you are using a camera obscura—a pinhole device without optics or exposure controls—how an image is rendered is a two-step dance. This dance involves both the light transmitted or reflected by the scene the camera is capturing, as well as what the camera does with that light.
This relationship, or balancing act, between incoming light and the camera’s exposure controls has often been referred to as an equation (sometimes called the exposure equation). In other words, when incoming light is exactly balanced by the camera settings, then you get a theoretically “correct” (or “proper”) exposure.
20mm, 3 seconds at f/22 and ISO 200, tripod mounted
This is a bedroom in a simple country inn that rests on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais above San Francisco, California. It can only be reached by hiking along a trail on the sides of the mountain. When I reached the inn in the late afternoon, light was streaming in through the window of this back bedroom. I set my exposure to capture some detail in the room, while showing that parts of the room were in deep shadow in contrast to the brilliant sunshine coming in through the window.
48mm, 45 exposures at shutter speeds from 1/6 of a second to 1/20 of a second, exposures combined in Photoshop, each taken at f/29 and ISO 100, tripod mounted
Along the rugged northern California coast near Point Arena, I stopped to photograph a bed of sea palms—a kind of kelp—as the plants were struck by surf in the intertidal zone. To get a sense of the scale, one of the sea palms in the foreground of the image was about one foot high.
My son Nicky and I were alone on a rocky cliff facing the pounding ocean. Even though we were not in danger, he was worried that we would be swept away and kept running up to higher ground.
My goal in making the image was to show each individual sea palm in motion caused by the pounding surf. But the problem was that the individual plants didn’t move synchronously. I knew that if I held my shutter open long enough to capture all the plants in motion, my image would be way overexposed (and maybe even white). So I took 45 individual exposures, spaced out over about an hour, at settings that would correctly render the individual plants. When I post-processed the plants, I combined them using a technique called stacking—essentially creating a still version of time lapse photography.
200mm, 1/250 of a second at f/9 and ISO 200, tripod mounted
I knew that if left to its own device my camera would create an average exposure of the scene of San Francisco, California shrouded in afternoon fog. In making this average exposure, the camera would be fooled by the prevailing bright light coming off the fog, and everything would seem way too light and bright. So I made sure to considerably “underexpose,” letting the clouds go gray and the hills and trees become very dark—which led to a more pleasing overall image.
Don’t start worrying that you are going to have to use equations and algebra to be a good photographer! For one thing, theoretical correctness in exposure is truly unimportant to how a photo comes out. For another, there are only a few variables you can use to set a camera, and their relationship is pretty simple. It’s amazing— but true—that much of the technical craft of taking photos can be understood and mastered as long as you understand what goes into an exposure.
The three exposure controls you can use on your camera to adjust for incoming light are aperture, shutter speed, and ISO.
Aperture is easily understood as the size of the opening inside your lens that lets light through. The larger the opening, the more light reaches the sensor—and the smaller the opening the less light gets in. Aperture is explained in more detail on pages 82–85.
Shutter speed is not really a speed at all; rather, it is a duration of time—how long the shutter is left open to allow light to pass in through the lens to the sensor. For more about shutter speed, see pages 86–91.
ISO, also called sensitivity, is used to set how light sensitive the sensor is.
In the days of film, ISO was mostly set depending on the film you used (although some films could be processed to raise or lower effective ISO). In the digital era, one can dial-in ISO on a per-exposure basis—with trade-offs explained in detail on pages 92–97.
Aperture, shutter speed, ISO—this is the triangle used to control the way incoming light is rendered by creating an exposure. The point is that if these three are set to match the incoming light, they are in a kind of balance. If you decide you need to change one of them, you’ll have to compensate by changing another to keep the balance!
You’ll find that if you start thinking in terms of the three exposure variables as you make photos that pretty soon you’ll unconsciously know how to set your camera—and your images will greatly benefit.
Get your camera off Automatic
There are several good reasons for taking
your camera off Automatic exposure
control, and never turning Automatic back
on. I like to think I am smarter than my
camera, and usually I am!
Your camera is only a bunch of electronic
circuits connected to a lens
Your camera
can read light—but not think creatively. So
become the boss of your camera by not
letting the Automatic exposure setting
take over.
If you don’t set your own exposures—using Manual exposure—you won’t learn about the subtle, and not-so-subtle, impact that changing your exposure settings can have.
Sure, there’s a place for Shutter-preferred
or Aperture-preferred exposure modes.
And, sometimes I even use fully Auto-matic exposure—for example, when the
subject is moving faster than I can think
or react. But in most situations you will do yourself
a big favor by using Manual exposure. It’s
also the only real way to get a sense of
your exposure controls that will become
intuitive, unconscious, and second nature.
Here are the links to the other free excerpts:
• Overexposure And Underexposure
• Using A Histogram In Photoshop
• All About Aperture
• Working With Shutter Speeds
• Working With The ISO
• Using Exposure Controls with Lighting
• White Balance And Color
• Pre-Visualizing the Impact of Lighting
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