Hints & Tricks Photography Program

Photography is all about light! Without thinking about lighting conditions, photographs can be flat and lifeless, or we can make them pop with life. Lighting affects the tone, mood, and
atmosphere of a photograph. It’s up to you as the photographer to either manipulate the light for certain effects, or time and position your photographs to create a desired effect. In order to do this, you need to know how to take full control of your camera settings. The exciting part of photography is that once you know the rules you can break them!

Depending on your light source and the time of day, light can be considered hard or soft. Hard light creates defined and dark shadows while soft light creates soft shadows. Hard light usually comes from one bright light source while soft light is diffused or reflected from multiple sources and angles. If you are using natural light, the bright mid-day sun creates hard light and is often avoided by photographers. The early morning and light afternoon sun creates a softer, often golden effect, which can completely change the feel of a photograph. This is the kind of light landscape and wildlife photographers love, however, don’t neglect hard light when it can create interesting shapes and shadows. Cloudy days, fog, and even air pollution soften the sun’s light.

The light you choose to use depends entirely on the effect you want to create. Should you want sharp contrast in shapes and textures, then hard light is the way to go.
Soft light is best for portraits and to accurately capture colours in a photograph.

Natural light refers to daylight while artificial light can come from a number of manmade sources. The light you use depends on your photographic situation and the desired effects you want to create. Natural light is difficult to control so you will need to time your photography well depending on the time of day, weather, seasons, and your location. Whilst artificial light is easier to control, it does require more equipment and is only suitable in circumstances where you can control the light. You will control the hardness/softness of the light, its intensity and direction to create different effects.

The light coming from behind the flower was extremely bright, so the front was in shadow. Using a reflector I bounced light back onto the flower.

Now we will start to learn how to take control of our cameras and lighting. Three important factors come together: aperture, shutter speed and ISO. They work together to create different effects in terms of how bright or dark a photograph is. Light is always required to take a photograph, so depending on how much or how little light is available, we will need to adjust our camera settings so the sensor will pick it up.

Aperture refers to the opening in your lens and determines how much light is allowed onto
the sensor of your camera. The settings for aperture are referred to as f/stops. The higher the f/stop number, the smaller the opening; the lower the f/stop number, the wider the opening. Therefore, an aperture of 2.2 will let a lot of light on to the sensor, but an aperture of 22 will allow very little light onto the sensor. Every lens is different in terms of its lowest aperture.

In addition to control the amount of light let in, aperture also controls depth of field (DoF). DoF determines how much of the foreground and background is in focus. A low f/stop means only a small part of the subject is in focus, while a high f/stop means the subject and background will be in focus. As usual, you will use the f/stop that suits your purpose.

The shutter in the front of your camera acts like a curtain and opens for a certain amount of time (usually just a small fraction of a second) to allow light onto the sensor of your camera. When cameras still used film, the shutter allowed light to expose onto the film in order to capture the scene. Now we use digital sensors. So, depending on your shutter speed, the longer the shutter stays open, the more light is allowed onto the sensor. Shutter speeds are useful when you either want to freeze action or create movement. This is why it is so important to understand how to control your settings to allow you to make creative decisions.

When you plan to use slower shutter speeds for creative effects, it is very important that your camera remains steady without any shake. Beanbags, tripods, or monopods are all good options to keep your camera still. If you are using very high shutter speeds, then hand-held is usually fine. Keep your elbows tucked in, stand firm and your camera should be held still enough.

Since it was very dark outside, the shutter speed needed to be slowed right down to allow enough light to enter the sensor to capture the stars. This required about 30 seconds, so a tripod was absolutely necessary to keep the camera still.

Here the water droplets can be seen as if frozen. This required a high shutter speed, around 1/4000th of a second.

I slowed down my shutter speed very slightly here so that the lion would stay in focus but show some movement in the rain drops. This required a very slow shutter speed to show movement in the water.

Most cameras also allow you to control two more aspects of light: exposure and ISO. Let’s look at each separately before putting it altogether. What is exposure? More advanced DSLRs allow the photographer to brighten or darken an image based on the lighting surrounding their subject. This offers endless creativity.

The spotlight on the lion was quite bright in the darkness, so I lowered my EV to about – 2 to make sure the lion wasn’t extremely bright against a dark background. This makes it a little more natural. This is also known as a low-key image due to its focus on darkness.

The area surrounding the wild dog was in bright sunshine, but he was in the shade. I overexposed slightly to get rid of the background and keep the wild dog slightly brighter in the shade. This is also known as a high-key image as it is quite bright with lots of white space.

Composition is all about how you frame your image. This is actually very powerful as it can take an average image to a work of art by carefully thinking about the way in which you frame your subject. Composition refers to how you organise the elements contained within your photograph. Essentially, you want to make sure you draw your viewer’s eyes to the most powerful part of the image. When we photograph landscapes, we have a little more time to think about how to compose a scene effectively, but in wildlife and other forms of spontaneous photography we must make these decisions quite quickly. This requires practice! There are a number of ways you can compose your images.

Here are 9 composition rules: