Meet Laura. Laura is an old friend of mine going all the way back to college. Not that she’s old. In fact she’s one of those few people left in the world with an age that begins with a “2″. It’s just that college seems like a long time ago now. Anyway I’ve taken a few photos of Laura over the years, and I think it’s fair to say that she always photographs well. Excluding, perhaps, photographs of her bird and fish impersonations, but let’s not go into that now.
This candid shot of Laura was taken late on Friday night after the music had stopped at Niamh & John’s wedding. The ceiling lights in the room had been turned on, instantly raising the light level. While earlier dance-floor photographs had required the addition of some artificial light, with the ceiling lights on, this was no longer necessary.
Those of you who care about the exposure details will notice that I was still helping things along with a wide aperture, a high ISO, and about as slow a shutter speed as I could manage handheld at the 50mm focal length. But the D300 performs well with high ISO, and while there’s some noise in this shot, it’s not a big deal. The wide aperture has the added effect of a nice shallow depth of field, which softens the background nicely, while the 1/50s shutter speed was just enough to keep the image sharp at the point of focus – in this case, the eye closest to the camera.
I subscribe to a photographer’s forum online where a long time ago a photographer called Bruce Dorn started a thread called “Available Magic – Lighting on location” to champion the world of off-camera supplementary lighting, with the theory that “available light” is any light source that you have available to you in your camera bag, as opposed to its traditional meaning of the light that is naturally (from the sun or the ceiling lights) in your scene when you go take the photograph. Two years on and 1752 posts later that thread is going strong, and a great source of inspiration for artificial light photography.
Many of the shots on that thread show that most of the time, adding light to a scene in a controlled way will improve a photograph in one of two ways – by adding contrast of light (shadows versus highlights) or by adding contrast of colour (for example, a warm artificially lit subject against a cool blue dusky sky).
In this image, there is already good contrast between the shadows and the highlights, mainly because those ceiling lights are in effect acting as off-camera light sources. In fact, there was a light over my right shoulder which became the “main light” for this shot – you can see its reflection in the catchlight in Laura’s left eye, and you can judge its angle (which is, conveniently, where you might choose put a main light in a studio setting) from the nose shadow.
The ceiling lights are also acting as the fill light – there is light from them bouncing off the wall to my left for instance, which is filling the shadows on Laura’s face – again coming from where you might put a fill light in the studio.
And there’s also good colour contrast in the shot, thanks to the pink wall lights in the background which give that pink/purple/blue wall and ceiling against which the tungsten-lit subject is highlighted.
It’s easy in photography to fall into the trap of over-lighting images, or thinking that you must control all the light by killing the available light and adding artificial light, especially as you become more comfortable with artificial light sources. There are times where this is very much the right approach. There are other times though where there is no need, and where you can let the available light work its magic. Last Friday night at about 2am was one of those times.
Recent Comments