Ben Crawford Photography | Freelance Travel, Landscape and Lifestyle Photographer

Photography Tutorial #1 Light

Posted on 04 May 2010 | by Ben | Filed under Blog

I went on a trip recently with a friend who was getting into photography and I really enjoyed sharing my knowledge with him. It was amazing how many things that I do or think about automatically while taking a photo seem so foreign to someone starting out. So I’m going to try and share some of these same things in my blog – a tip, fact or tutorial each week to help you improve your photography.

So let’s start at the beginning. Light.

Without light we wouldn’t have photos. If you understand the basics of light and how it impacts on your photography then you will be able to take better photos straightaway.

Light is essentially energy radiating from a source. It travels in a straight line from that source as a wave, just like waves in the sea. One of the most common sources we use in photography is the sun.

Visible light is made up of a range of wavelengths from violet through blue, green and yellow to red. Violet has the shortest wavelength and red the longest. White light is made up of all of these wavelengths and colour only becomes visible when an object reflects back some wavelengths while absorbing the others. For example white objects have reflected all the light back while a red object has absorbed all the colours except red.

The sun is the only light source that emits all wavelengths at equal intensity and is therefore the only true source of white light. Other light sources that photographers find themselves dealing with (such as light bulbs, fluorescent lights or candles) emit more of some wavelength colours than other colours. Have you ever noticed your indoor photos have an orange or yellow hue to them? This is because the white balance settings on your camera are not correctly set for the light source you are shooting in. Similarly you will notice a blue hue often when shooting in cloudy conditions.

White balance is the adjustment your camera makes to try and ensure everything that is white in the scene you are shooting is rendered white in your photo. While our eyes are very good at detecting the different light sources we are exposed to, often our cameras are not and we need to override their automatic settings. Most digital cameras, except for simple point and shoots, let you control white balance settings and have pre set levels based on typical light sources e.g. sunlight, cloudy, flash, incandescent, fluorescent or custom.

Have a look at your camera now and see if you can find your white balance settings. It may be shown just as WB. You will see all of the pre set options. Now try taking a few photos of the same object but adjust the white balance setting each time and take note of the effects. It’s quite varied – see example below.

The image above was shot using the ’sunny’ white balance setting. But the source is actually incandescent light. Note how the walls, yoghurt and skin tones have an orange/yellow hue….

The image below is the identical photo but the white balance has been corrected for the incandescent light source and the whites in the image now appear white.

Ideally you should shoot on the setting that matches your light source and change it for every new light source you encounter. This will give you your best results. If you don’t have the time to do this or forget, then set it to automatic, but as soon as you notice a weird colour hue, switch your white balance and take the photo again. Unless you are shooting in RAW mode (I’ll write a post on this later on) where you can adjust the white balance in post production, you won’t be able to recover your image if you don’t adjust for it on the spot and take another frame.

Next week we’ll look at understanding exposure and the three main elements that influence it – aperture, shutter speed and ISO. In the meantime happy shooting!