Learn How to “See the Light”

By Rick Sammon

Compare these two photos of a little girl I photographed in a small village near Chitwan National Park in Nepal. The photo on the left was taken in harsh sunlight, which created unflattering shadows on the girl’s face. The photo on the right was taken in the shade, where soft, even light produced a more flattering effect. Learning how to “see the light,” and how it affects our pictures, is of the utmost importance in photography.

(I shot both photos above with my Canon EOS 1V, 28-105mm Canon lens, and Kodak Elitechrome 100 slide film, but all of the advice in this article can also be applied to digital shooting)

When we take a picture, we record light on a digital sensor or film. Before we take a picture, it's important to observe the lighting conditions.

The first step in learning how to see the light is to look for – and be aware of – highlight and shadow areas in a scene.

To digress slightly for a moment...

Have you ever heard of “tone-deafness”? This describes someone who can’t tell the difference between musical tones. In photography, we use “value blindness” to describe an image with very little range between light and dark. Ansel Adams used this term. Just as a tone-deaf person cannot tell the difference between tones or musical notes, a value- blind viewer doesn’t see the difference in light values (brightness levels) in a scene.

Fortunately, there is hope for the value-blind photographer, because we can all learn how to “see the light.”

We usually want the main subject of our photos to be in the highlight area. When we look at a picture, our eye is usually drawn to the brightest part of the scene first. If the main subject is hidden in the shadows or shade, someone looking at the picture may think, "What's the main subject?"

Recognizing a scene's highlight and shadow areas, however, is not enough. We must observe the scene's contrast range, that is, the difference between the scene's brightest and darkest areas. If the contrast range is beyond the recordable contrast range of the image sensor or the film, as it is in the first sample showon above, part of the scene will be overexposed or underexposed. In this case, the eyes are in deep shadow and are too dark, or underexposed, compared to the girl's face.

Most print film can record about five stops. Slide film and digital image sensors are less forgiving, recording only about three stops. The human eye sees about 11 stops, which gives me a tremendous appreciation for the gift of sight, but can also fool us into thinking that what we see in a scene is what we will capture with our cameras.

If we learn how to compress the scene's contrast range, we can shoot an evenly exposed picture. We can compress or reduce the scene's brightness range in five ways:

• Recompose your scene or reposition your subject to eliminate the areas that are too dark or light.
• Use a flash to fill in some of the shadows in a scene.
• Use a graduated filter (dark on one half and gradually becoming clear on the other) to darken the brighter portion of a scene.
• Use a reflector to bounce light onto the dark area of a subject.
• Hold a light diffuser over a subject to soften (or even eliminate) shadows.