Everything photographers need to know about lighting

Your lighting is going to determine your aperture, your shutter speed, your ISO, your angles, and your lenses – it's going to dictate everything about the picture. Basically, if you're not thinking about lighting, you're simply not thinking about photography. 

 

If you’re already familiar with everything I listed above, keep reading. If not, read my blog post on achieving proper exposure before diving into this post about lighting. 

 

 

Natural Lighting

 

There's different ways of understanding lights and there are different light types and light sources. Natural light is anything that’s a continuous light source. Most commonly, it's outdoor lighting, like the sun in the sky. But it's also going to be other light sources such as a light in the room, a lamp, or anything that has continuous lighting. Overall, natural light is very unpredictable!

 

If you’ve shot around Magic Hour, you'll have noticed that lighting changes so fast. You’re shooting one minute with a certain setting, and then you turn around and suddenly, the lighting has dimmed so much! Now you have to change all of your settings. 

 

Of course, natural light is the dream – studio flash photography is always trying to imitate natural light, because that's what we all want, it's always what photographers are aiming for. Unfortunately, natural light is very unpredictable and can be difficult to control. 

 

Studio Lighting

 

Studio light is anything that’s happening indoors in a studio. We commonly use strobe lights, and they work in fast bursts of high intensity light. Strobes are not going to be dropping constantly like outdoor light, which is continuous lighting. 

 

Because it's such a fast output of light, you're going to sync your shutter speed to what it needs to be to capture the strobe’s burst of light. If your shutter speed is too fast, you’re not going to have time to capture that light. You want to set your sync speed to around 1/60 of a second, or whatever the speed is that your studio lights are set to, which leaves the control of the lighting with your aperture. 

 

Flash Lighting

 

There’s also flash photography. Flash lighting is a fast output of light that’s usually attached on top of your camera, although sometimes you can get devices that you can hold to the side and trigger manually. Like strobes, you’ll also need a shutter speed sync of 1/60 or 1/100 of a second for flash photography. 

 

Flash lighting is a lot less powerful than strobes, and it's also coming from a very narrow direction. Instead of it being a big source of light, like the sun or a big strobe light, it's the size of an iPhone, which affects your image based on how much light you're getting. 

 

Although flashes are quite limited, they're very portable. The best way to use a flash is to use it when you have lower levels of natural light, such as an indoor wedding or an outdoor fashion shoot, where you can fill in the shadows and complete the light that you're missing. Flash photography is also great for events, because they can help you freeze motion. The additional burst of light can get you up to a 1/160 shutter speed to freeze action.

 

Always consider these lighting factors

 

Now it doesn't matter what kind of photography or what kind of light you're using for your images. Whether it's natural, studio, or flash, you're going to always think about light in three different terms, and these are: quantity of light, direction of light and quality of light. 

 

Quantity of light is simply considering how much light is available – is it bright or is it dim? The direction of light is literally where the light is coming from, like the sun – is it high above at noon, or coming from a lower angle at sunset? Lastly is your quality of light, which refers to direct versus indirect lighting, AKA harsh sunlight versus a cloudy day. 

 

Considering these factors when it comes to your lighting will help you understand what lighting you're dealing with. It will help you understand how to use that information to modify your image, so you can control the outcome of your image every time.