Digital Photography-And The Proper Lighting

November 2007

You have to have good lighting in order for your digital photographs to turn out the way you would want them to. Digital photography like regular photography, pretty much has two different kinds of lighting to get that great photograph that you're hoping for. These, you have rightly guessed, are the artificial lighting and the natural lighting sources.

Artificial lighting may be as simple as the built in flash and as complicated as you would be willing to create for your picture, while your natural source of lighting would come from either daylight with its numerous variations as to time of day, sunny or cloudy weather, etc, or from nightlight generated by a bright moon or even by the stars.

When you are photographing with poor lighting you will no doubt have to do a lot of touch ups on your digital photographs. The weather plays a big part in the kind of lighting you might be getting, if you are relying solely on the natural light effect. If you're taking care of the lighting on your own, then you need have no worries about that.

If you are going the artificial lighting way as your source of light, you could choose anything from among a fluorescent light, some kind of floodlight, halogen lights, or just a plain old light bulb. There are many types of artificial lighting you can choose from. If you are taking digital photographs using this kind of light it doesn't matter if you choose to take them inside or out, for either way would work just fine.

On the other hand, if you're going to go with a natural light for your digital photographs just hope for great weather if you're going to photograph outside. Bad clouds can create a blurry look to your photographs or sometimes it may create shadows in your pictures and I know you wouldn't be happy with that. On the other hand, with a good digital camera you may get very interesting images of clouds -- even take special pictures of the sky, forgetting about the ground-anchored objects. You do not have to photograph using natural light only on the outside, as some may think. The sunlight coming in through the window, filtered by curtains or not, will work inside just as well if you do it just right.

Sometimes you have no choice but to use backlighting. In this case, you have to be very careful with it. The direction of the light is coming from behind the person you are photographing, which if you're not careful can cause the face to just totally be faded out. Again, you may choose to use backlighting for special effects, knowing its final result on your photographic object will be. The good thing about backlighting is that you don't have to worry about a bright flash from ahead causing the person to squint their eyes right when you click that photograph. I have plenty of photographs lying around where half the people in them look like they haven't even gotten awake yet. That's not the image that you are going for in a photograph.

Changing your position and camera angle can allow you to photograph the person where their main source of lighting is coming in from the sides. This will allow for better details than front or back lighting that you're looking for in your photographs. With digital photography you have many options as to what kind of lighting you will decide to use for your photographing. Choose them wisely, it all depends on what kind of look you are going for. I don't think you can go wrong though, because even if something doesn't turn out just the way you want it, with digital photography you have the option of correcting any flaws in your photographs by editing them later in the comfort of your home.

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