Basic Lighting Fundamentals

Photography is about lighting, without light, there’s no photograph. Photographers should be concerned with mainly the different characteristics of light namely:

• Direction of Light
• Quantity of Light
• Quality of Light
• Depth of Light
• Color of Light

These basic fundamentals of light will not change regardless of whether you’re using natural light or artificial light.

Light can alter mood, texture, and impact of your subject, and understanding lighting and knowing how to control and modify light will help your photos take a big step to the next level.

Direction of Light

Defines photograph by placing the highlight and shadows of your subject. The choosing the correct direction of light use the highlights to accentuate the important features of the subject while the shadows hide the less important or distracting elements of the subject.

Notice that despite having the same subject, subject position, and camera position, changing the direction of light alters the intent of the photo, highlights different areas of the subject, and hides certain areas of the subjects with shadows as well.

We can see this phenomenon everyday as the sun rises and sets throughout the day. In the morning and late afternoon, the sun is in a low position, close to the horizon, the shadow cast on the subject is long and directional, while a high-noon sun will have the subject’s shadow directly below the subject.

Quantity of Light

Quantity of light is similar to the brightness of the light source. Generally speaking, the brighter the light, the better for a photographer as we can always reduce light falling onto our subject with different light modifiers but we cannot increase the amount of light than the brightness of our light source.

In Figure 4 and 5, we can see that the images look identically lit, they both have similar brightness. However, Figure 4 was taken with a bright light source and we were able to use a much lower ISO setting (best quality) compared to Figure 5 where a weaker light source was used and we had to compensate by using a higher ISO setting to obtain a similar exposure.

The quantity of light plays a big role in exposure as the more light is available, the wider range of shutter speed and aperture combination a photographer can use. When the is an abundance of light, a photographer can use lower ISOs (best quality), faster shutter speeds (minimize camera shake and subject movement), and a wider range of aperture size (for depth-of-field). Without ample amount of light, a photographer will be required to use higher ISO, slower shutter speeds, and wide apertures that may not provide adequate depth-of-field.

Quality of Light

The quality of light is the same as the contrast of light. A high-contrast lightsource would usually be a light that has a narrow beam pattern of light creating a sharp transition between shadow and highlight, while a low contrast lightsoure would be a wider or omni-directional light source that creates soft shadows with no gradual transition between highlight and shadow areas.

Hard Light

A prime example of hard lighting would be the shadows created by a high-noon sun in a clear sky. The shadows are sharply defined and would be really dark compared to the lit part of the ground. Without clouds acting as diffusing layers, the sun is a distant, pin-point light source that will cast hard shadows.

The smaller and farther the light source from the subject, the harder the light. Hard light produces harsh shadows and distinct highlights. This is best used to show off textures and angles of your subjects.

Soft Light

A typical overcast day filled with shadows is a good example of a soft light. The layers and layers of opaque clouds act as a diffusing layer that softens the hard light created by the sun. The light rays bounce around the cloud surface itself before reaching the subject, hence the scattered, omni-directional light.

The larger and closer the light source to the subject, the softer the light. Soft light works well on portraits and when we want to maximize the three-dimensional look of the subject, particularly with cylindrical or round subjects as well as soften facial pores and blemishes for human faces.

Depth of Light and Contrast

The depth of light dictates how light or dark the shadows are, the overall depth is also known as the “key” of the photograph. There are three basic “keys” of lighting: high key, mid key, and low key.

Contrast is closely related to the key of an image as well as contrast defines how gradual or abrupt the transition between light and dark areas of the image will be.

Notice how the shape of the shadow and the intensity of the light falling on the subject is identical, but the shadow in Figure 8 is a lot darker than of Figure 9. Figure 8 therefore has a higher contrast than Figure 9.

In order to visualize the depth of light, we should refer to the exposure scale below.

The entire left side of the chart represents the shadows range (pure black) while the center area represents the highlights (pure white). The right side of the chart represents midtone gray. Here is our baseline image, the exposure chart above the subject. The exposure is based on the midtone gray and is considered as a “midtone” image.

High Key

First of all, high key images doesn’t equate to an overexposed image. High key simply means that the exposure is biased towards the highlight with relatively low contrast.

Notice that the histogram has shifted to the right, with the shadows and midtone peaks moving away from the left and the highlight peaking with the most amount of data. Figure 12 shows an example of a high-key image.

In most cases, the image would be dominated by bright tones. High key images often exude a bright and airy feel.

Low Key

Low key is the opposite, a low-key image is predominantly dark with high contrast. The exposure is biased towards the shadows and often conveys a mysterious and dark feel.

Color of Light

Light rays have different color temperatures as we can observe througout the day with the sun. When the sun is low on the horizon, sunlight has a warmer color with shades of yellow to red. As the sun moves higher around noontime, the color of sunlight turns cooler with shades blue, that is why during the gradual change between noon to sunset, we can see a blue-to-red gradient in our skies.

Artificial lights also have their own color spectrums, for example, halogen and tungsten lights often have a warm glow while fluorescent lights have a cooler “daylight” feel to them.

The color of light can alter the mood of a photograph and can subliminally inform the viewer of the time the photo was taken. As shown in Figure 15, the difference in light color can change our interpretation of when a photo was shot. The image on the left mimics a high-noon scenario while the image on the right conveys an early morning breakfast tea session.

Understanding how to utilize the brightness of light, its contrast, depth, and color allows photographers to depict emotions, scenes, moods, venue, and other subliminal hints that can turn a common, everyday snapshot into a high-impact photograph.

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