beautiful, soft lighting used in portraits; the light
seems to come from all directions at once and
doesn’t leave any hard shadows, as shown in
Figure 2-1. This type of beauty lighting makes
everybody look good and is very flattering, leav-
ing a good impression with the viewer, which is
why it is used so much in fashion and portraits.
On the other side of the coin is lighting using a
small, hard light source that leaves hard shadows
and distinct lines. This type of light is not wellPhotography is about recording light. It doesn’t
matter if that is the light present at high noon
under a bright sun or if it is in a darkened arena
where the only light is from the stage lighting. As
a photographer, you have to know where the
light is coming from and how bright it really is.
That is, you must determine the direction and
intensity of the light. Luckily, there are light
meters built into the cameras that can read the
light present and help to get the right exposure
settings. These built-in light meters can be used
to measure the light in the whole scene or just in
parts of the scene allowing for more control of the
exposure readings.
Once you determine the amount of light, you
need to be able to control the exposure settings
on your camera so that you record the scene in
the way you want to. Picking the right exposure
mode or taking over full control and using the
manual mode are all covered in this chapter.
After you determine the settings, you need to
take the color of the light into consideration
because different light sources have different
colors, even though they might look the same to
you. Adjusting the white balance in the camera
can make all the difference to the final image,
and even though the white balance can be
adjusted in postproduction, it is always better
to try and get it right in the camera first.
DIRECTION AND INTENSITY
OF LIGHT
Where the light is coming from (the direction)
and how bright it is (the intensity) are the two
most important starting points in creating a pho-
tograph. These two factors can be intertwined
and related to each other, but more on that a lit-
tle later on. First look at how direction and inten-
sity determine how the subject is lit and how the
viewer will react. Take, for example, the
ABOUT THIS PHOTO When photographing a series of volley-
ball team photos, I placed the coach against a black wall in the practice
room and used a small softbox on the flash to soften the light as much
as possible. You can see that the shadow under the chin does not have
a very sharp edge, but fades from light to dark. Taken at 1/200 second,
f/7.1, and ISO 200.2-1