2.4 Lighting (2 min.)-2

Photography is sculpting with light. In the era of film, tiny silver halide crystals coat celluloid film. These created the image as they react to light. Making an image depended on having just the right amount of light where you wanted it and when you wanted it.

Even with today's super-fast digital sensors, understanding lighting can expand your range as a photographer. Simply varying the time of day when you take photographs will introduce you to seeing direction, angle, color and temperature of light in exciting ways. Exploring local qualities of light is a great way to learn new places as you travel. If you're traveling safely with a group, go out an hour after dawn or within an hour of dusk Links to an external site. to shoot pictures. Longer shadows, softer low angle light, and interesting atmospheric effects produce dramatic landscapes and flattering portraits.

[IMAGE: Virginia Tech engineering students sleep off jet lag during a trip to the Soviet Union in 1979. Thirty students traveled for two weeks. Digitized color slide from VT global engineering alum Doug Burton (BSEE, 1980).]

Notice the slight yellow tone in this classic color slide from a VT study abroad 40 years ago? Lord, Kelvin! Links to an external site. There's a big difference between 1,000 and 10,000K color temperature. It's the difference between a snowy field that appears blue and the warm glow of birthday candles. Color temperature gives every photograph a "cast" from warm orange to cool blue, less visible when white is balanced to neutral.

It is often best to avoid photographing in hard, directional indoor lighting or sunlight at high noon. You may have already experienced the problem of shooting a back-lit figure with proper lighting. A cell phone camera typically sets its exposure automatically based on where it focuses--this sometimes produces washed out skies or darkened foreground figures. If you look closely, you'll see that the students' faces are under-exposed (darkened) in the photograph below. This probably happened because the camera averaged its exposure between its focal point (their faces) and the bright background (a glacier in Iceland).

[IMAGE: detail from photograph of VT students on a glacier in Iceland during spring break, 2019. The Green Program.]

The editing options and High Dynamic Range (HDR) features built into newer cameras can help with these problems. There just has to be sufficient light for the camera's sensor to capture enough information. When it works, you get a balanced photograph with a full range of tones: 

[IMAGE: Virginia Tech engineering student Gelila Reta takes time for cultural immersion during a VT faculty-led trip in India in 2018. Notice how her white shirt creates soft reflected light on her face while the camera also picks up subtle variations in tones in the background, including between the sky and the marble of the Taj Mahal.]

Learn more: You can really go crazy learning professional tips on lighting Links to an external site.. Heading to the Gobi desert or touring Mont Blanc during your time abroad? You will definitely want to review tips for handling lighting in harsh reflective conditions.