Mobile Photography Weekly

- Hey everybody, Sean here. And welcome to bad... midday light. The sun is almost directly overhead, really bright. And you know, this is the time of day when a lot of photographers will not even go out to take pictures. They will leave their camera back in the hotel room. They won't even try to make pictures. And that's because... they are thinking of making pictures in certain types of light. Especially if you're a landscape photographer where you wanna have that early morning or late afternoon light, which you know, there's a reason why that's called the sweet light and the golden light.

And it's true that for certain subjects, this type of midday harsh light is not very good. Certainly not as good as some other types of the day. But, sometimes that may be the only time when you are at a certain location, or the only time when you are with a certain person in order to make a photograph. So, what we're gonna do is talk about ways to work with bad light when you have to, and know how to recognize certain things that could detract from the photo. We're gonna start out with a portrait situation.

And, you can see with the light on my face, the light on Julia's face, it's very bright, very harsh. She's got some squinting going on there, and who can blame her? It is so bright. I don't blame you for squinting. And I have a nice composition with the stairs, but it's kinda harsh. And... (camera shutter) there's shadows and... (camera shutter) hard highlights on the forehead It's not ideal. So when you find yourself in this sort of harsh, bright, midday sun and you're making portraits, really the best thing that you can do is find softer, more even light.

Open shade areas. So let's go see if we can find a tree. Alright, so luck was with us. We found a tree, found several trees actually. And we've got some nice shade on Julia here, but, as you can see from probably my face too, the light is somewhat dappled. And that's pretty common when you're working with sunlight coming through trees. And what happens is you end up with these highlight spots on the subject's face... (camera shutter) and a lot of times, it is a lot more noticeable... (camera shutter) in photographs and what you see with your own eyes.

So, we're gonna go to another tree and find a little bit more even lighting where we don't have any dappling. Alright, so we found a tree with a thicker canopy, we have nice, even, open shade light on Julia's face. Definitely a lot more preferable. You can see there's none of the dappling that we had earlier. So this is definitely the way to go. (camera shutter) Oh, beautiful, and if you could look that way, give me a profile shot. (camera shutter) Oh, I like that one. Yeah. (camera shutter) So with portraits, if you're out in the midday sun, really the best way to make a better portrait is try to find light that is more even, and flattering on your subject.

And open shade is definitely one way that you can do that. Now that approach is not gonna work well for all subjects, of course. But, what you have to do is essentially work with the light you have. Find subjects that lend themselves to that harsh, bright light. Maybe subjects that work well with high contrast, shadows, textures, things like that. And if you're photographing a landscape, it's not uncommon to be traveling, and you happen to be at a cool location at the wrong time of day, in terms of how the light is.

So, go ahead and take the pictures anyway, but find ways to recompose them. Maybe have less of the sky if the sky is really washed out and concentrate on the textures of the land. Also, you can often convert a landscape picture to black and white, and that might fit that harsh, stark quality of the light a lot better than color. The thing about "bad light", is that a lot of times it's based around expectations of what you want to do with the photograph, whether it's in the early morning or the late afternoon.

So sometimes you just have to move beyond those expectations and work with what you have, and you can still make a successful shot.