Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Low Light Photography Without Flash

By Amy Renfrey


Light tells us a lot of special things. It tells us whether the environment is safe or not. It tells us whether or not we can trust our environment.There is a good reason kids are fearful of the dark, and this exercise shows that we have never truly moved out of that. But, not all photos with intense shadow capture this feeling of alarm. In actual fact depending on the way we create the image, and photograph it, we can really capture something quite interesting.

Light also has an influence on tone, texture, vibrancy and our background environment. We can be in charge of our lighting in many ways; f-stop, shutter speed, using the flash, fine tuning the intensity of the flash unit, using supplementary lighting sources, using an individual lighting source, making use of filters, affecting our photos in Photoshop, moving a person from a dark space to a window and many more things. It's very important to work well with light because it assists you to you tell your story. And story telling is what taking photos is all about.

When you want a well lit picture but can't produce it, it can be tremendously hard. This can include situations like shooting speedy motion indoors, without the subject being too blurred. This is nearly unworkable so we then use additional lighting sources to help us get more light so we can speed up the shutter. We speed up the shutter so we don't photograph any blur. In a case like this we might use the light from the flash, utilise a higher ISO to make the camera more sensitive to light or employ other light sources.

On saying this however, from time to time you will not like a bright picture. At times you might want to make something somewhat moody and intense, or on the other hand, gentle and romantic. This may require dim or very little light. You can still get good pictures with a low intensity of light.

Many wedding and portrait shots are used with quite gentle lighting. It makes the story and general picture look gentle. Window light is an example of how light that can accomplish this. There are other ways to capture lovely photos using very little light. I've done it a lot of times. It takes time but before long you will know light and be able to create the mood and feeling you wish for.

You don't always have to capture people when using soft light. You can place an emphasis on the outline of an object. You could only want to emphasise certain things and not others. Let's take a look at an example of a photo I took with this exact theme in mind.

Canon 5D, F5.6, 1/250th of a second, ISO 4000, 105mm.

In this photo here I shot my husband's fingers. He was in his studio drawing up measurements for his next painting. As I noticed his hands move smoothly over the canvas I couldn't help thinking how lovely the light was. It cast a soft and warm light over the entire room. I wanted to capture the gentleness of the movement, by preserving the lighting on certain components of the image and not others.




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