Digital Camera Master

Cameras love light, that’s for sure. In general, you need the flash for indoor shots but not always. Some of the best interior photos use nothing more than light streaming in from a window. Pictures taken with only ambient light without adding flash are called existing light or natural light photos. Portraits taken in natural light have a classic feel, reminiscent of timeless paintings by great artists like Rembrandt.

Of course, relying solely on existing light isn’t always feasible, but if you can manage it, natural light has the following advantages over flash photography:

• More depth. Flash photography’s big drawback is that it illuminates only about the first ten feet of the scene. Everything beyond that fades to black. If you turn the flash off, your camera reads the lighting for the entire room. Not only is your primary subject exposed properly, but the surrounding setting is too, giving the picture more depth.
• Less harshness. The light in an existing-light photo generally comes from a variety of sources: overhead lights, windows, lamps, and reflections off walls and ceilings. Combined, these factors create soft, balanced lighting, instead of the stark, whitewashed glare that a built-in flash often generates.
• More expressiveness. Too often, flashing in your subjects’ faces produces that “deer in the headlights” stare. Existing-light pictures tend to be more subtle and expressive, because the people you’re shooting are more relaxed when they’re not being pelted by bursts of light.

The vast majority of digital cameras come with an automatic flash to compensate for any lighting deficits. In the interest of keeping the customer happy, camera makers design the flash to ensure that you get a picture every time you press the shutter buttoneven if it’s not the most attractive, artistic one. If you want to get creative and flash-free, these tools come in handy:

• Flash control. Before you ask your significant other to perch on a stool by a sunny window, make sure you know how to turn your camera’s flash on and off. (It’s not always obvious.) An unwanted blast of light is unpleasant for the model and, perhaps, embarrassing for the photographer.
• Adjustable ISO (film speed). If your camera lets you adjust the film speed, try a setting of 200 or 400 to make your camera more light sensitive. (If you have enough light for a decent exposure, though, then don’t increase the film speed, because it’ll slightly degrade the image quality.)

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Tip: To tell whether you need to increase the film speed, simply review a test shot. (On the LCD screen, zoom in, magnifying the photo, to inspect it more closely.) If the image is too dark or has motion blur, increase the film speed from 100 to 200. Take another test shot. If it still looks dark, try increasing one more time to 400 speed. And open the drapes all the way.
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• Spot meter. Consider turning on spot metering. It permits the camera to make exposure decisions based only on the subject, without being affected by the lighting in the surrounding background.
• Remote control or self-timer. Holding the camera still may well be the biggest challenge of existing-light photography. If a remote control came with your camera, use it. If not, use the camera’s self-timer feature, which counts off a few seconds before snapping the picture automatically.
• Tripod. A high-quality tripod is an optional accessory, but if you take a liking to existing-light photography, you’ll find it invaluable for holding the camera steady.
• Reflector. To help direct existing light where you need it, you can use a photographer’s reflector panel. Or you can make do with any white cardboard, paper, or sheets you have lying around (more details in a moment).

1. Keeping it steady
When you forgo the flash for a natural light portrait, the camera’s shutter has to stay open for a relatively long interval to admit enough light for a good picture. As a result, you need to keep the camera very steady, which is much easier with a tripod. Pocket tripods are great for this type of shooting. They weigh only a few ounces and steady the camera on all kinds of surfaces like tables, countertops, and so on.

Once the tripod is steady, you face another challenge: taking the picture without jiggling the camera when you press the shutter button. Even a little camera shake can blur your entire image, creating an out-of-focus appearance. So, just avoid pressing the button: Make the camera do it instead. Employ your camera’s remote control or self-timer to put some distance between your body movements and the camera.

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Tip: If your camera has burst mode (Section 1.12), here’s a golden opportunity to use it. The jar of your shutter press may ruin the first shot, but by the second or third shot of the burst, things are much steadier.
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2. Managing existing light sources
Creating a natural-light photo means learning to work with light on its own terms. You have to take your model and camera to where the good light is. Great painters of the past preferred the light coming through a north window for their portraits, especially in the early hours of the day. Try this positioning for your existing-light portraits.

To adjust your composition’s lighting you have to reposition the model, the camera, or both. But you’re not as powerless as you think. You can turn overhead lights on and off, open and close window shades, move table lamps around, and take lampshades on and off. The most common problem in existing-light photography is a shadow darkening the model’s face. Try turning your subject at a different angle to the incoming sunlight, or pull over a table lamp to illuminate the dark area.

You can also find a reflector and position it so that light bounces off the reflector onto the dark side of the model’s face. A reflector is a common piece of photographic gear; it’s essentially a big white shiny surface on its own pole. If you don’t have lighting equipment sitting around the house, but you really want this portrait to look good, just rig a big piece of white cardboard or white foam board to serve as a reflecting surface.

Figure 1. In this existing-light portrait, notice how the tones trail off quickly from light to dark, which is typical illumination from a window. To brighten the shadow areas, use a reflector to bounce the light back toward the mode. You can try a flash for fill light, but be careful not to ruin the mood of the scene. Your best bet is to use the nighttime flash mode, to preserve some of the scene’s ambience.

Once you’ve balanced the tones, take a picture and review your results. Shadowed areas usually look darker to the camera than they do to your eyes. If so, move the reflector closer to brighten the shadows. In this type of photography, you learn to look at the lighting the way the camera would see the scene, not the way you would normally view it.

3. Tweaking white balance (color balance)
Here’s a mind-bending example of the way your eyes and your camera see things completely differently. It turns out that different kinds of lightsregular incandescent lightbulbs, fluorescent office lighting, the suncast subtle tinges of color on everything they illuminate. When you shoot non-flash photos indoors or in open shade outside, you’ll get a bluish or cool cast. If you shoot without a flash under incandescent lighting, then the shots will have a warm tint, mostly yellow and red.

So why haven’t you ever noticed these different lighting artifacts? Because your brain compensates almost instantly for these different color temperatures. (Your brain does a lot of compensating for light. Ever noticed how your eyes adjust to a dark room after a couple of minutes?) Your camera, however, doesn’t have a brain. It simply grabs whatever warm or cool tints it sees, and those tints can detract from your onscreen or printed photos. For example, portraits with warmer casts are generally more pleasing to the eye. But natural light from the window imparts a bluish cast, which isn’t good for skin tones.

In the days of traditional film photography, you could compensate for (or correct) the color temperature by placing a screw-on filter over the lens. With a digital camera, you don’t need any external accessories. Almost every digital camera lets you correct the color temperature by adjusting its white balance (sometimes called color balance).

Most cameras have a little knob or menu offering icons like the following:

• A sun icon represents normal daylight conditions in direct light. (If you know about filters in film photography, the sun/daylight setting is equivalent to the Sky 1A filter.)
• A cloud icon is for overcast days, open shade, and window-illuminated interiors (81B warming filter).
• A lightbulb icon is for incandescent lighting (80A cooling filter).
• A bar-shaped icon is for fluorescent lighting (FLD fluorescent correction filter).

Figure 2. Most digital cameras let you adjust color balance. Sometimes the setting is labeled WB for white balance (essentially the same thing as color balance). Most of the time, you can leave this setting on Auto. But if the tones start looking too cool or too warm, you may want to override auto and make the adjustment yourself.

4. Taking the picture
In natural light photography, think of yourself as an artist, using light as your paintbrush. It takes time and practice to become proficient, but even your first efforts will probably surprise you with their expressiveness. Keep the following points in mind:

• Don’t skimp on setup. When you’re working with existing light, the work you do before you shoot is what determines the quality of your results. Take a moment to review your camera’s aperture-priority, self-timer, and white balance settings. If you need a tripod, borrow or improvise one so you don’t get frustrated trying to hold the camera steady.
• Don’t be too quick to delete shots from the camera before viewing them on your computer. Existing-light shots sometimes contain subtleties that don’t appear on tiny LCD screens. Images that looked uninteresting on your camera’s two-inch display may surprise you when you see them full size.
• Be patient with yourself. With time and practice, you’ll be able to calibrate your eyes so they see shadows the same way your camera does. You’ll spend less and less time testing before the shoot, and more time creating your classic image.
• Be patient with your model. During a long exposure, fidgety people mean blurry portraits. (Of course, you can use this effect to your advantage, too, if you want to create a moody interior picture with ghostlike subjects.) As the photographer, you set the tone for the shoot. It’s your job to persuade your models to sit still, put them at ease if they’re nervous, and chat with them when they’re bored.