Photography Lighting TechniquesHere are three photography lighting techniques that will help you when you are evaluating your photo lighting: 1. The Squinting Technique Our eyes and our powerful brains do a great job of viewing a scene and seeing both dark shadow and bright highlight areas with great detail. Digital cameras are not quite as good at capturing that same range of brightnesses.A quick way to preview how a photograph will look is to squint your eyes as you look at your subject. It sounds a bit unusual, but with a little practice it works well. Squinting will give you a quick view of the brightness levels of all of the objects in your photo. Generally, bright things are more emphasized than darker things in our scene. Our brains work in such a way that the bright areas are noticed first and are more dominant. The squinting technique will help you see what may be emphasized. One good point for this one, you don't need a camera to practice. 2. Look at the Shadows This technique is appropriate when you have a continuous light source like the sun, the sky or light from electrical lighting. When you look at the characteristics of the shadows to tell what direction the light is coming from. This action photo of superstar Rafael Nadal was taken late in the afternoon. I noticed the long shadows from the sun, so I thought it would be fun to include them in my composition. If I had walked around to the other side of the stadium, his shadow would have been blocked by his body. 3. Take a quick glance at your LCD screen When I was in photography school, one of professors would use a similar technique when we had critique sessions of our photos.He would show us the submitted prints for a very quick time frame, perhaps just 1/4 of a second. I must admit it was annoying, but it really made you evaluate the lighting, the dark and light areas of a photograph. We only did Black and White Photography for the first year at photography school, but you can learn to see photography lighting even better when you are not distracted by the colors.
This is a quick glance technique to get a first impression only. Don't study evaluate everything just yet. Practicing these techniques will get your brain trained to interpret lighting conditions automatically. Photography Lighting Systems. There are a wide variety of photography lighting systems available for you to buy. Here are some thoughts on the pros and cons of each. Back from Photography Lighting Techniques to Photography Lighting
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Taking a quick glance at your camera's view screen gives you a quick impression of your photograph.