Understanding The Quality Of Light In Photography

One of photography's most important values, the quality of light, is a constantly moving target. Each time of the day comes with ever changing light, as does each season of the year, and each change in the weather. Photographers must understand the quality of light in their frames in order to make better images.

Hard Light

Hard, or harsh lighting comes from a singular source such as the sun, a spotlight, a flash, or a light bulb. The harsh light creates very high contrast scenes and is often used to create an unvarnished mood in images. Bright sunlight, especially during midday, produces sharp edged shadows and lots of contrast. While sunlit areas show colors brightly, shaded areas have dull colors and even close to black. Although the extreme light and dark can make for strong compositions, both shaded and highlighted areas can lose detail. Camera sensors simply cannot hold enough detail in both brightly lit and shadowy areas at the same time. However, colors can still be vibrant and intense, so long as the light is not so bright that is washes parts of the image out with glare.

Soft Lighting

Soft light is more non-directional and envelopes around subjects. Soft light doesn’t cast dark shadows nor bright highlights, and the subject only casts just a faint shadow, if any. Since glare is not an issue in soft light, subtle tones and rich hues are well reproduced. Portraits can often benefit from soft lighting, as well. Since soft lighting casts little to no shadows, forest shooting can be much easier since the hard shadows will not be present.

This image was taken during an overcast day with soft light. As a result, there are no harsh shadows to confuse the image.

Bright Light Situations

The Magic hours might have the low light perfect for most images, but if you want contrast and severity in your image, portraits and certain landscapes can actually benefit from midday light. However, shooting in the middle of the day has limitations where the subject may benefit from sidelight. Reflectors or fill flash can help with the foreground.

This image shows bright sidelight hitting the fields and mountain range, with dramatic storm clouds above.

Lens Flares

During midday sun, while shooting directly into the sun, and with especially strong sun, lens flare can occur and either ruin your images, or add some artistic touches. Lens flares happen when stray light does not refract, but instead reflects back and forth within the lens structure before reaching the sensor. Although lens flare can give the feeling of “heat” in an image, it often simply ends up giving a purple fog to part of the image. My guess is that, like me, you probably don’t consider this a good quality of light when making your images.

Lots of unpleasant lens flare in the lower half of this image. Remember to watch for it in your viewfinder and adjust the angle of the lens accordingly.

Using Exposure Compensation In Bright Light Situations

So your’e out on a sunny beach or in bright snow, and the scene is just too bright. Counterintuitively, this is when you should use your exposure compensation to add an additional +1/2 or +1 stops of light into your scene to allow your camera’s sensor to read the exposure correctly. Camera sensors will try to set your exposure by averaging the entire image so that brightness does not go beyond 18% gray. Since snow and sand are brighter than that, your camera’s automatic metering will try to set the snow or sand dark gray, instead of white. By overexposing, you give the snow it’s bright white color back. If you’re making landscape images, you can always use exposure bracketing to create images with better balanced exposure.

Low Light Situations

Let’s face it, many of life’s more meaningful events and moments happen in low-light conditions. Film cameras were never great at recording these scenes, which resulted in lots of grain in these images. The higher end camera sensors today do a much better job handling ISO, with some going as high as 102,400! Now you can take photos in dimly lit restaurants, clubs, in front of a fire pit, and during twilight, and still have an image with good detail. However, not all sensors are equal, and some images can be unusable beyond ISO 6400 with some cameras.

Since high digital ISO will result in detail loss with your images, make sure you test your camera’s capabilities long before you try to make good images in low light.

Luckily, color saturation usually increases in low light situations. One thing to always think about with the quality of light, especially in these low light situations, is that you will need to use lower shutter speeds (even with the ISO ramped). The longer shutter speeds will definitely have the effect of adding some motion blur in your images. Since slower shutter speeds are needed in these low light conditions, you may get some surprises with your resulting images, including motions and colors that you didn’t see in the viewfinder.

So remember to always be thinking about the quality of light with your photography, as it will undoubtedly cause you to make adjustments with your camera, as well as make better images.

Please leave any comments below.