Mastering Light: Part 2
Frontal Lighting
You know this light. Everyone knows this light. It’s the old over your shoulder, point your shadow at your subject, Kodak film package approved, sort of light.
Hands down, this is by far the most common type of light, right or wrong, that both landscape and wildlife photographers photograph in. It’s easy light to work with. It’s even, it fills in shadows, it simplifies exposure, and it helps boost saturation of colors. Frontal lighting is the go-to type of light used the world over. When someone first begins to even think about what direction the light is coming from and where they should stand in relationship to it, THIS is the light that they use.
The strength of frontal lighting comes from its ability to reduce contrast. Contrast is the dance between light and shadows that can trip up the metering system in your camera and give your varying exposures and therefore varying results if you do not know how to handle it.
When photographing with the more modern tools available in your camera such as 3D matrix metering (Nikon) and Evaluative metering (Canon), for instance, your camera attempts to balance the highlights and shadows of a scene which can very quickly create problems with both over and underexposing depending upon the ratio of highlights to shadows or dark to light tones.
Frontal lighting simplifies all of this.
Of course, wherever there is light, there is also dark (shadows). It’s just that when utilizing frontal lighting, those shadows are cast in a direction that cannot be seen, for the most part, from the angle of the camera. Instead, all you see is the illuminated side of an object and nothing more. This creates even lighting and relatively easy exposures.
There is only one problem though.
Frontal lighting also happens to be one of the most boring ways to illuminate your subject. For all the reasons listed above that make this light so user friendly, those very same reasons can also make this lighting scenario flat and lack luster.
By eliminating contrast, we also eliminate the very thing that allows us to create depth, volume, texture, life, and mood.
The idea that contrast is the enemy, and something to battle with and eliminate from our compositions is born out the novice’s desperate attempts to simplify the sometimes confusing and complex notion of obtaining a perfect exposure.
The idea behind this book is to help you move away from this sort of rudimentary understanding of photography.
So, is this chapter going to be some sort of anti-frontal lighting manifesto?
Absolutely not!
Frontal lighting has its place in wildlife photography. Like all of the different types of light that you will find yourself faced with in the natural world, this lighting scenario has its strengths and weaknesses. The key thing to remember though about this form of lighting, is that it should never be used as some sort of default or assumed to be a magic bullet to exposure success.
BIRDS, REFLECTIVITY, AND COLOR
When it comes to photographing wildlife, you will find that different types of light are going to always be better for certain subjects. And by subjects, given that this is a book on light for wildlife photographers, I actually mean different species.
This is a big leap for any photographer to take. I cannot begin to tell you how many glazed over blank emotionless stares I have received on workshops when I mention something like this.
But is this really such a difficult concept to wrap our minds around?
Let’s look at it this way: every species of animal out there has something about them that makes them different from everyone else. On a grand scale, this is as simple as the fact that birds have feathers and mammals have fur. On the smaller scale this can be the giant red eyes of a red eyed tree frog, the massive curled horns of a bighorn ram, or the elegant breeding plumage of a great egret.
As photographers, as artists, it is our job to identify these attributes and decide how to handle them in our photographs. Maybe such attributes are something you want to exemplify. Maybe it’s something you want to hide. These are decisions that you must be able to make with each wildlife subject that you approach.
So, with this said, different types of light do in fact work better for different types of animals. And when it comes to frontal lighting, birds are one such group of animals where this type of lighting really works well.
When it comes to photographing birds, frontal lighting is more often than not the preferred type of lighting for two reasons: the light reflecting properties of feathers, and color.
Feathers are essentially light bouncing machines. Whereas fur will often times seemingly absorb light, feathers do just the opposite. This is, in part, why many dedicated bird photographers often have flash brackets and Better Beamers set up on their rig when photographing avian subject. In many situations, just a minute pop of flash from the direction of the camera will really give a bird’s feathers a nice punch.
Birds the world over are known for their brilliant colors. This color is directly related to the light falling on those feathers. So the angle and type of light that we photograph birds in dictates EXACTLY how those colors will be represented in our photographs.
To understand this though, we need to understand just a tiny amount of physics (gasp!).
The first thing you need to understand about the relationship between color and light is that no object on Earth, that is to say no bird, mammal, flower, or anything else actually possess color. All color that we see in the world comes from light bouncing off of the object, not the object itself.
You see, the sun’s light appears white because it contains the full spectrum of color that the human eye can see (there are others that we cannot see that many other species can, such as ultraviolet).
Those colors that our eyes are capable of seeing are: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. You might remember the acronym ROYGBIV, or as taught in most elementary schools ROY G. BIV. When all these colors of the rainbow are combined, we have white light, or full spectrum light - daylight.
So how do we go from white light to the red of a scarlet tanager? Bird’s exhibit color one of two ways. Either through pigments in their feathers or light refracted from their feathers. So, due to the chemical makeup of a scarlet tanager’s feathers, all colors of light are absorbed into their feathers EXCEPT red - which is reflected off the feathers. Because of a protein-based substance called keratin that absorbs all colors of light except for red, the scarlet tanager appears red simply because that is the one wavelength of light that is being rejected and reflected off of the keratin.
Likewise, the white of a snowy egret’s feathers are the result of those feathers bouncing back the full spectrum of light and thus creating white.
So, in order to have a red tanager, we need some degree of light on the tanager to begin with to reflect red light back at us. It stands to reason then that with more light falling on those feathers, the more red light we will have to work with.
More red light, photographically speaking, means more saturation. More saturation in color means a richer experience for the viewer of your photographs.
Think of billiards. When you hit a ball against the side of the table from a 45-degree angle, the ball bounces at the same 45 degree angle - only in the other direction. If we hit a ball square on, it will bounce back and hit our billiards cue.
Light and color work the same way.
When light hits an object, the color reflected back is going to be the most intense and saturated when it's coming straight back at the source of light. As begin to view light reflecting of our subject from an angle, the color we see becomes less intense and less saturated. The more of an angle to the light, the more desaturated the color.
Therefore. . .
Frontal lighting helps to increase the richness, vibrancy, and saturation of colors.
This is why colorful objects and animals in low or dim light appear muted and dull. On overcast days, colors appear lackluster because of the overall lack of light available to be bounced back at us.
Color is therefore a function of light.
So, when it comes to photographing birds, a subject known the world over for the vibrancy and colors of their feathers, frontal lighting is the preferred type of light if we want to exemplify and showcase that color.
But, take this statement with caution. Just because frontal lighting is the preferred choice for photographing birds due to its ability to help reflect and saturate color, this does not mean that birds cannot, or should not, be photographed in other types of light. In fact, the other preferred type of ambient light to photograph birds in is overcast light, but with the addition of fill flash to help saturate colors and make the subject stand out.
This example of photographing birds with flash is exactly why it is so crucial to understand light and how / why it does what it does with a given subject. The light coming from a flash is still light - and frontal lighting at that. And the frontal lighting produced by fill flash will emulate everything that the sun can do - only you can adjust the intensity of it and what part of the composition that it falls on.
This alone means that photographing birds on overcast days with the use of flash is often more effective than simply working with frontal lighting created by the sun itself. Like I said, light is far more complicated than you might expect. Which is why it is critically important to start here with some basic physical properties of light and how it relates to color.
Confused yet?
Hopefully not. The key thing to remember here is that the different types of light addressed in this book are, in a sense, multidimensional in that they dictate the direction the light is hitting the subject, as well as the lighting effect that is the result of that direction.
To be continued. . .
I am making my entire book, Mastering Light, free to read for everyone here on PhotoWILD Magazine as a series of articles in preparation for the new and updated version we are currently working on.
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We are giving away Jared Lloyd’s book Mastering Light: The essence of wildlife photography as he begins work on a new and expanded edition.