Photography Lighting for the Home Enthusiast

It's a classic mistake that every beginner photographer makes - to not think of how important lighting is to the final effect of the picture. Photographers at the learning stage, often look at light as a kind of annoyance to be dealt with if that. To wait on the right time of day for the effects possible in the light of a setting sun, to play around with reflectors and lights to get the right balance of shadow and form when shooting indoors, strikes anyone anyone starting out like it's a little too finicky. To them, great photography is supposed to happen in spite of the elements - not because of them. So what does this do to beginner's pictures to not take photography lighting seriously? Usually, there are areas of too much light and some areas that are too saturated and dark - and you see shadows playing in all the wrong places.

In photography lighting is everything; it can make a cheap disposable camera come out with pictures of lasting value, and it can make pictures taken on a Hasselblad look like something out of a cell phone camera. Inexperienced sound engineers and recording musicians often make mistakes during the recording process, and then assure everyone around that they'll fix it in the mix. Photographers like to say that they'll fix it with postprocessing - there's always Photoshop. It should be a rule you should never break - if you aren't an expert, you should never use postprocessing or Photoshop to hide defects in a picture that should have never happened in the first place. Somehow to me, the best lighting in the world comes shortly after dawn, and shortly before sunset there's just something about the golden warmth of the light in these hours that makes everything stand forth and pop out of a picture.

What could it be about a sun that's low on the horizon that makes for such great photography lighting? I think it's always wonderful when the light comes at a sheer angle. And it isn't just the golden hue of the light - life is much softer at these hours and the shadows are more beautiful. Remember - the aperture size setting on your camera, otherwise known as the f-stop - is a great way to exploit the lighting you have. In lowlight conditions, using a wider aperture (a lower f-number) will give you beautiful effects of saturation, and prominence to your subject. A wider aperture often blurs out the background, and creates great atmosphere.

Hand-in-hand with the size of the aperture, is the speed you choose for your shutter, and how sensitive you wish to make the sensor on your digital camera. I've found that for most conditions, a 200 ISO setting for the sensitivity works best; it's possible to experiment with higher numbers but you risk getting washed out pictures. The key to exploiting beautiful light conditions is all in how patient you are. You really have to understand how starkly different a picture can be in the bleak lighting of a cold winter's day, and warm and inviting on a rainy summer's day, and a bright freshness of the spring sun. It's really a shame that people, even advanced students of photography, obsess over equipment - and the most important component of a well-made shot, imaginative photography lighting, often gets pushed to the background.