Understanding how light behaves is essential to taking control of your photos. Lighting not only elevates your technical skill but directly shapes how your viewers feel about your images.
Coming to you from Sean Dalton, this practical video breaks down three fundamental lighting concepts: the quality, strength, and direction of your light source. Dalton emphasizes the difference between natural and artificial light, pointing out that sunlight typically offers the most appealing results because of its softness and rich color. Yet he doesn't dismiss artificial sources, instead highlighting their advantage of control despite their inability to perfectly replicate sunlight. This balance is crucial because understanding these strengths and limitations directly affects the decisions you make while shooting, whether indoors or out. Dalton goes further by demonstrating why some artificial sources, such as inexpensive bulbs in cafes, produce poor results due to flickering and inconsistent color.
Dalton then moves on to explore the strength of your light source, distinguishing between hard and soft light. Hard, intense lighting can create sharp contrasts and challenging exposures, especially during midday. This isn't always negative, however; he provides examples of scenarios—like urban photography—where dramatic contrasts add character to your images. Alternatively, softer lighting, which is typically less intense, offers easier exposure management and smoother gradients. Understanding this difference is vital, as it informs your approach to shooting in varied conditions. Dalton provides clear advice on navigating these challenges, showing when to embrace hard lighting or seek softer, diffused scenarios for optimal results.
The video's strength lies in its clear explanation of directional lighting—front, side, and backlighting—and how each affects the mood and depth of your photos. Dalton suggests that side lighting often produces the most visually engaging results by adding dimensionality through shadows, though he also appreciates backlighting for drama. These tips encourage you to actively adjust your position relative to your subject and the source of light, highlighting how even slight shifts can dramatically enhance the storytelling quality of your images. Dalton also briefly touches upon simple modifiers to shape and control your lighting further, enabling even greater flexibility during shoots.
Dalton emphasizes continuous learning through observation, recommending you regularly study how light interacts with your surroundings, even without your camera in hand. By cultivating this habit, you'll instinctively know what lighting conditions to seek out or avoid, significantly refining your photography over time. This habit builds a natural intuition, allowing you to anticipate and leverage ideal conditions wherever you photograph. He further underscores that the key to improving your photographic lighting skill is consistent experimentation across different scenarios—embracing challenging situations rather than avoiding them. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Dalton.
