Lessons

Lesson Info

Indirect Sunlight

Indirect sunlight, alright. So now we are out of the sun and the sun is illuminating other stuff, and it's bouncing in towards our subject. And this is gonna be really good for people photography and a lot of other types of photography because it's not as intense as that bright sunlight. Lot of people who don't understand, I see this on the news all the time, the weather forecaster is telling you it's a sunny day. Oh this is a beautiful day to go down to the beach and take photos. Like no it's not. It's a beautiful day to be at the beach maybe, but that's not the time to be shooting photos in the middle of a sunny day. And so now the dynamic range is well within our camera's abilities. Notice on this photo, the brightest area and the darkest area are all very easy to see. And so that's a very comforting thing on the eyes because you can really examine all parts of that photograph. We don't get those hot spots. We don't get those really blocked up shadows. And so this allows to play a l...

ittle bit more with this image in post-production. If we wanna brighten it, if we wanna darken it, we can make certain areas lighter and darker a little bit more easily because it's all within the range of what our sensor has been able to handle. Now these are not as bright situations, and so our shutter speeds are gonna be a little bit slower. We have to be steadier about the way we hold our cameras. We might need to use tripods in some situations. We don't have as intense of shadows, which means we may not have the texture that we would have in other types of photos. And so we have to be thinking about what is that color bouncing off of and how does that affect everything else around it? Because we're gonna be a little bit affected by that light. And if we can go on Kenna for just a moment, you'll notice that we have a blue backdrop today. And this blue backdrop, Kenna can I come over here? And this blue backdrop is reflecting a little bit of blue light on the side of Kenna's face. And you'll notice over here it's a little bit of blue, it's a little bit of reflected light right over here. Yours too John.(laughing) Well yeah that's why I stand away from the wall. (laughing) Now it'll, it's on the whole room we've got a little bit of blue going on right now. Alright so some thoughts on working with this. This is a good time for looking for shots that really have a lotta detail on them because this is, these lower contrast scenes are very very easy to pick up all that fine-tuned detail because we don't have all that contrast hiding that important detail. Get that macro lens out. Good time to be in the forest. So if you wanna take a hike in the forest, I know a sunny day you don't have to bring the GORE-TEX with you, but it's the cloudy day that you're more easily able to photograph a lot of the details. And normally, and this photo is a good exception, but we have a lotta rules of thumbs, and you can totally break these rules of thumb. But generally you wanna avoid too much white sky. In this case, that was just the day that we had, and I tried to fill the frame and have as little of the sky in the photograph as possible. Different types of indirect light. We'll talk about overcast days, so that's your basic cloudy day, open shade, so it's sunny but you're working in the shade. There's gonna be reflected light, we talked about that. And then there's kind of a mixture of different elements. So your overcast cloudy day, we know about this here in Seattle, trust me. We've become experts at it. Nice even lighting. As I mentioned, it's well within the range of the sensors on all the cameras out there. Great time for shooting those details. And it's nice consistent lighting. You know when you get out there and you get in a groove, and you're shooting good stuff, this is real easy to do. If I had to go shoot let's say like a soccer jamboree that they're playing soccer all day long and I'm shooting photos of all the kids playing soccer, I would hope for a cloudy day. Nice even lighting to work with. The worst thing would be a partly sunny day where there's clouds and sun, clouds and sun, and I'd have to be switching exposure all the time. Bright sun would have too much contrast. Nice cloudy day, works for a lotta different situations. We might be needing our tripods. We're gonna need a little bit slower shutter speeds. We don't have as exciting a color. It's just you know plain basic colors, so it's our subjects are gonna have to kinda stand out on their own because they're not as exciting with the lighting. And just showing a plain old white sky that doesn't have any detail does not look real interesting, and so we're gonna kinda be cropping those out in many situations. And so only include that sky if there's something interesting or something going on in it. Get that macro and the telephoto lens out, looking for those details. Keep that tripod handy. And as I had mentioned before, this is a great time to be doing that walk in the forest. So on that sunny day in the forest, look at all these bright spots up in the trees, these blown out highlights where we don't have details because our sensors can't handle bright sunlight and deep shadows at the same time. Come back on a cloudy day, and we have nice even lighting here. Alright let's get a little technical. Let's look at the histogram for both of these images. Notice the image on the right, the histogram over there has a spike over on the right-hand side, and that's all those blown out highlight spots that we don't have detail. Now from time to time, a little blown out highlight is not a bad thing. But here there's kind of important detail that is part of the scene that we're looking at and does not work in this situation. Horseshoe Bend, I got a little bit of clouds in here, but we do have some kind of interesting texture in the clouds, so I'm okay with a little bit of texture in the clouds. In fact I think I had to use one of my graduated neutral density filters to get a little bit of that texture in the clouds because the clouds were so bright compared to everything else. So next up is open shade. So the sun is out, but we're finding shady areas in which to do our work. Which gives us nice even illumination on our subjects in the shade. And so you can work with this even on bright sunny days. I know a lotta times, photographers who don't like that bright sun, kind of oh it's a sunny day, terrible day, I'm not even gonna go out and shoot. Well if you can find the right areas and the right subjects, there's plenty of stuff to work with. Because all you need is just something to cast a shadow. And it's pretty predictable. If you know you have a bright sunny day and you know you have a big wall or a hillside, there's something gonna be on that other side that you can work with. And so you can see it's a bright sunny day, but we went into the shadows to shoot the portrait. But that sun moves around so it's not always available for a long period of time. We're not working with as fast a shutter speed, so we might need a tripod, we might need little bit shower shutter speeds. And we do have to be careful in these cases because if we are in the shadows, and up above us is a gigantic blue sky, that's a gigantic blue reflector on us. So we might need to play around with the white balance, which is why cameras have a sunny setting and a shade setting. And that shade setting is taking this into account that there's gonna be a gigantic blue reflector. And so it really depends on the environment you're in because you could just have somebody under just a little tiny roof, but a huge bright blue sky. And once you start becoming aware of it, you'll realize oh they look really blue in the skin. And a little adjustment and white balance or a little adjustment in post might make it look a little bit more natural. And so just think about any place you're gonna find to be able to work with that's gonna have those shadows that you can shoot at. As I say, you may need to play with that white balance setting on your camera. And so there are places to work with on sunny days. And once again those detailed subjects, and a face, a human face, is a very detailed subject. And so that's something that you typically don't want to shoot in bright sunny weather. And so we can be very clear, it is a bright sunny day. I think we can all agree that. But the flowers in the foreground are all in the shadows, and that's gonna be easier to work with. Another example of my neutral density filter that we talked about yesterday. Lots of details here, working in the shadows. Lotta blue cast on this as well because it's an overcast day. Using that blue overcast to my advantage, I kinda like that blue look, down in Chile, along the coastline with the sun kinda hidden behind the Andes off to the left. Highly detailed situation. Open shade. You don't wanna have bright sun on this. It would be very hard with this particular composition. Another one of my favorite types of light to work with is when light is bouncing off of some other subject to illuminate your primary subject. And so this is gonna give us that nice even light that is not as contrasting as bright sunlight because it's not as bright, the shadows are not as dark in this case. And if you have something that is the right color, which is one of the reasons I love some of those desert environments in Utah and Arizona. This happens to be in Jordan where you have these brown walls. It's a very beautiful light that is bounced off of those walls onto your subject. And so you're gonna need bright sun in order for this to work. So this is something that you can be working with in that bright sun time. And this is gonna be available to you most of the day. As long as the sun is up at a fairly high position, hitting something that's nice and bright, it's gonna work out quite well. And it is weaker in power, so once again you're gonna be at a little bit lower shutter speeds, but it's still pretty easy to work with. The color of the subject is really important, of the reflecting object. You can't reflect off of a dark green tree for instance. It's gotta be fairly bright in color. So that eliminates some of the things that might be able to be used as reflectors. So just be aware of what the paint color is on the building for instance. And there are limited places that it's gonna really work out well. But once you start to see them, you'll understand how to take advantage of them. And so you have to be aware of what that reflected color is because that's gonna be affecting your subject. Now you wanna be careful in these situations about getting direct sunlight because you're working in the shadows and any bit of direct sunlight is gonna be very very bright in comparison, and it's probably gonna blow out and not give you a lotta detail in there. And so thinking about where is the sun's hitting and what might be reflecting off of it. And these two items need to be fairly close together. We'll talk about controlling light in a later section, but using a reflector, you've probably seen a photographer or photographer's assistant holding one of those reflectors, and you can't hold the reflector from 30 feet away and have it do much good. You gotta get it pretty close, usually just outside the frame lines. And so you gotta have something fairly close. Something way off in the distance doesn't do much at reflecting light, so you gotta get it really really close to it. So the photograph that you just saw of the tobacco farmer standing in the doorway of this building was shot right outside his barn on a bright sunny day. And so I had him stand out of the sun in the shadows of the building, alright. So not in the sun, away from the sun. And what's illuminating him? Well it's generally that big open blue sky up above that is illuminating a lot of him. But he's also being illuminated by the sun hitting all that ground, that light colored dirt, right in front of him which is bouncing back, giving a nice warm light. And that's really what the light is. That's overpowering the blue sky. So we're getting a fairly nice look on that. Now as far as how I set this up, I just wanna make sure that I'm not getting a lotta bright sunlight in the photograph. And so I gotta be careful about the angle of view and other things in the photograph and what's in the background. And so that's the shot right there. Now I did let in a few little spots of bright sunlight here. There just really isn't any way to block this in this composition, and it's such a small area of the composition I'm willing to accept that. But that's how that subject was illuminated. And then the tobacco leaves in that farm, photographed exactly the same way. And what was drawn to me, what I was drawn to, was well this is a nice subject. But the light was hitting the dirt down here and bouncing right up. It was just had this beautiful reflector, really close by that was a nice color. Dirt in itself is not that interesting, but it makes for a very nice reflector in a lotta situations. In this case, what you can't see here is right about where my arm is is a big wall. And I think it was yellowish tannish brownish in color, and that's filling in the shadows on her face so that it's a little bit closer. If this building wasn't here, her face would just be all black and shadows because that would be just a plain bright light situation. But here we have that reflected light filling in those shadows. Light bouncing off these walls, you can see the color of the walls. I had the father put the kid up on the horse, and I just wanted to get a shot with nobody in it, but the father didn't wanna go very far away. So one little bit that you may not have seen is, down here, that's the father's foot right down there. (laughing) He wanted to be able to be right there and jump in in case he needed to help this kid out in any way. And this is the Treasury Building in Petra. And I got here very early in the morning, our group got there very early because we wanted to get there before everyone else got there. But this photo was taken about three, four o'clock in the afternoon when we were getting much better reflected light off of the wall that is near us reflecting the light onto the building itself. And so I didn't see this until much later in the day, and so I always thought that you'd wanna be there first thing in the morning because that's when the light is the best. But in this case it's actually later in the afternoon you get a beautiful reflected light. And everyone else is tired and they're going home, and so I didn't see a lot of other photographers shooting this at that time. Another type of light that is very hard to plan for, it's very hard to work with, is just some sort of mixture. And to be honest with you, most of the time when we're outside we are dealing with a mixture of some type of light. There's gonna be sunlight, and pretty much any time there is sunlight, there is gonna be some filling in of the shadows of reflected light because there's something else the light is hitting and bouncing off of. So this can be very very dramatic if it's in the right quantity. But with that it's very hard to control obviously. And so sometimes when it gets good, it just seems like it gets to be fantastic, and it goes away very very quickly as well. And so once again we are getting kind of that spotlight, but we're getting it reflecting around as well so it's gonna highlight that section. And it's great for showing texture as well. And so this mixed light, we do have sunlight coming in, but we also have a bunch of grounds, I think this was a dirt area, bouncing light up, filling in those shadows. So it's not just pure straight harsh sunlight. Now there's gonna be many things that this doesn't work with because it's too strong of contrast. It depends on the type of subject that you have. Be careful of any sort of direct highlights that are blowing out sections of the image that are very very important or shadow areas that are lost. And sometimes this can only be available for the shortest periods of time. And so it's gonna be better when there is a little bit of a soft mix where the light's not too intense and there are other areas where it's bouncing around a lot. And so once again be careful about your exposure, watching for those highlights and the shadows. And if it gets too harsh, well there's not much you can do because remember it's just very harsh to deal with very contrasty situations. And so here's kind of a nice mix. We're getting some direct sunlight in, light's also bouncing around, filling in the shadow areas. The shadow areas are not too dark. I was having a hard time, I was down in California shooting, and it was just sunny all the time. And I wanted to shoot in the redwoods, and it just got sunny. So I went out really early in the morning before the sun got very far up, and this was pretty much the end of the day because you can see the sunlight starting to come in and starting to overexpose some small sections. This is a terrible time to be in the forest shooting. It's enjoyable to go hiking, and it's enjoyable to just kinda look at it with your own eyes. And what's happening with your own eyes, the reason why it's so bad photographically, and it's okay to be there and see it yourself, is that your human eyes are adjusting for these areas of brightness and darkness when you're there in person. But when you shoot a photo, you have to do everything in one shot, and it just exceeds the range of our cameras. And so coming back when it's even lighting is when you can get the good shot with your cameras.