16 Better Available Light Digital Photography
making your camera see like you can, or even better than you
can. Taking pictures without blasting your subject with direct
fl ash defi nes Available Light Photography. And that light can
include fl ash bounced off a wall, sunlight refl ected from a pool,
monocolor light buzzed from a neon tube, the hot blue light of
a welding torch, or a simple desk lamp.
The quantity of light dictates what exposure you’ll set, which
is covered in more detail in Chapter 2. The subject of this
next section is the color of that light and how to handle the many
variations in natural- and artifi cial-lighting situations. Today’s
digital cameras can easily handle most daytime lighting situa-
tions with no problem. The obvious exceptions are during a full
solar eclipse or under a dark and heavy cloud-covered sky in a
summer thunderstorm. Today’s digital cameras can handle many
different kinds of indoor low-light situations too.Sometimes the lighting gear can
be an important part of the subject,
too. Joe posed his wife, Mary, in
front of a studio fl ash unit with an
umbrella mounted and photo-
graphed her using only the fl ash’s
tungsten-balanced quartz model-
ing light. The Canon EOS 10D
was set in Auto White Balance
mode (for more about color-
balance settings, be sure to read
Chapter 4) and took on this blue
tone that he liked. Exposure was
1/10 sec at f/4.0 and ISO 800. ©
2004 Joe Farace.
Let’s look at the challenges to successful artifi cial-light photog-
raphy. The type of light indoors is quite different from that pro-
duced by the sun. Indoor light has a different color temperature
and it often illuminates from different directions and angles.
Do your interior images have an awful green cast to them?
Unhappiness is a portrait of a blonde with green hair. Do your
photographs have an orange or yellow cast to them? Unhappi-
ness is a portrait with orange faces.