Shot of the Day: Looking for Easy Light

This week’s post picks up on the last SoTD post about looking for locations. Locations are not just about space – they’re about light! You can have the most amazing space in the world, if the light is bad, it’s no good to you as a photogrpaher. Good light will make all the difference to your shots. And easy light will be an absolute treat!

Easy light is just that, sweet and easy to work with. It’s characterised by being smooth and soft – it wraps around your subjects gently and evenly and doesn’t create harsh shadows or glaring highlights. It is a doddle to meter for, precisely because there are no huge shifts between light and dark. Generally you’ll find easy light in the shade – seems a bit of a contradiction I know, but if you’re outdoors on a bright sunny day (the place where most beginner or amateur photographers seem to want their subjects to pose ) then you’re going to be faced with hard light. Hard light not just because it is difficult to work with (which it is) and because it”ll require fill flash or reflection (which it does) but because the quality of the light itself is hard and it creates unflattering shadows – it’ll make hard shadows, particularly under the brow ridges of your subjects.

In the pic that I’ve included here – from Hanna and Jaco’s wedding in Paarl – we shot in the shade against the window of the church. We were a bit pushed for time – the venue was a bit of a drive away and the service had run over schedule – and I had to get the family photos done in record time. Shooting in easy light meant that I barely had to change my settings the entire way through the family shoot. Had I shot them in the sun I would’ve been faced with high, shifting cloud, with bright, glaring sun and I would’ve been constantly metering and remetering my scene (because of the shifting cloud).

Shootingi in the shade doesn’t simply mean sticking your subjects in a dark hole. In the shade that I was shooting in there was also reflected light from the concrete and grass in front of them – a bit like having my own personal reflector, just on a much bigger scale. So the shade is not dark as in I need a flash light to light my way, it’s simply dimmer than the surrounding brightness. When you’re looking for easy light, this is one of the things you want to look out for – shade that has light being bounced back into it. It’ll be hard to spot when you’re not used to looking for it, but you should get the hang of it eventually, especially when you see the effects on your images.

As great as shooting in easy light is, this post is not to say that you should only shoot in easy light. Shooting in tricky, high contrast light can be loads of fun (and I’ll try and put up a shot about this soon) but when you’re shooting groups, easy light is highly recommended. When you’re shooting one or two people, positioning them in tricky light is easy. Positioning five or six, or fifteen people is near impossible. As an example of this, imagine shooting a group of people under the dappled light from a tree. Trying to put all of them in the little bits of shade from the tree so that there are no blown out spots on their faces – a big like playing jenga with a grizzly bear.

And then just because I’ve been writing about colour recently for the Get Smarter online photography course that I’m putting together – I chose this spot because of the yellow band and because yellow is the complimentary of purple (the wedding colour for Hanna and Jaco) and because of the soft, dark blues in the stained glass window that help the light summery blues of the girls dresses to stand out. I also chose it just because I loved the huge imposing architecture of the window. But the colour was definitely a huge factor.

Here are my shot settings:

Shooting Mode    Manual Exposure
Tv( Shutter Speed )    1/125
Av( Aperture Value )    8.0
Metering Mode    Spot Metering
ISO Speed    320
Lens    EF24-70mm f/2.8L USM
Focal Length    30.0mm
Image Size    4368×2912
Image Quality    RAW
Flash    Off
White Balance Mode    Auto
AF Mode    AI Focus AF
Picture Style    Standard
Sharpness    5
Contrast    1
Saturation    1

Tags: Shot of the Day