Understanding Light Direction

Hey, what's up guys? Professional outdoor photographer David Johnston here for Outdoor Photography Guide. And today I'm coming to you from southern Utah. And what I want to talk about in this video is how light can dominate a landscape and in a place like southern Utah it really can dominate and kind of predetermine what you might want to shoot when you are there. Now that's not saying there's any room for movement in your creative vision, but understanding light can have a lot to do with how you compose a shot and how you frame up your subject, and also the direction that you want to shoot in any given time. Now first, what I want to do is talk about the three types of light and what they are in relation to your subject. So let's start with front light first. In any of these situations, the type of light is going to be the source of light, which is our sun, shining on the subject. So if you're having front light, you're having light that shine directly on the front of a subject. That could be lighting up a rock straight on the front of it and that light source would probably be behind you in some direction. So what you're dealing with here is something that's really bright and maybe you have a darker background. And in that way, you can create contrast and seclusion of your subject based on the type of light that you're getting out of it. Now on the flip side, you can have something like sidelight and sidelight is when you're photographing a subject and you have a lot of directional flow of light coming in from the side. So if you're here, your camera's pointed straight forward and that sun source is going to be on one of the sides. Now this can have a really interesting impact on a lot of the subjects that you do photograph and kind of create like this side glow and interest level on the corners of the frames of your photograph, too. Now the third type is backlight and backlight is when you're photographing directly into the sun and that sun source is behind your subject illuminating it from the back. This can be one of the most difficult types of light to photograph because you are shooting directly into the sun. How do you balance the light in that situation? What I like to do is a variety of things. Number one, if it's easier to balance let's say more of a mid day shot, you can just take one photograph and you're good to go. If you're photographing something like sunset, a lot of times what I'll do is either bracket the shot and merge those together or I'll even blend two exposures together and create an exposure blend doing that. But those aren't very technical topics to really figure out in post-processing. Back light's the most interesting because it is those shots and sunrise and sunsets when you have illuminated subjects. And this is when you also get glowing features around the subjects in your photography, like rim lighting, which is the glowing effect that you get on the edges of your subjects when you're photographing directly into those and the sunlight is behind them. Now that's not to say that you only need to photograph in these situations. Predominantly what I like to do is photograph when there kind of is no light, or there's diffused light on the landscape. And that's kind of like this area that I'm photographing in right now. There's a lot of natural designs, but there's even light over the entire scene and I have a lot of playfulness that I can work with within this composition and photograph some natural designs not determined on light sources creating harsh highlights and dark shadows, but I can have even light over the entire subject. Honestly, diffused shadowy light is my favorite to work with. Knowing all these are gonna help you take better photographs. I really hope they help you out and determine what your photographs can look like. And I know you're gonna get better results understanding the types of light and when to photograph which one.