The Moment of Light

We know, it is all about light. It’s also our experience that told us light can be either our best friend or worst enemy. Thus most of us would avoid direct pointing light (I know it has been ruins countless frame of your shot). But what you have not known is you might just missed out the magic moment when the light fall in straight on your canvas (censor or film).

I love natural light, especially in the late morning or early evening, while the sun light’s travel through the atmosphere at the angle that the colour temperature are slight warmer but not too warm. The direct light washout most part of your picture, the contrast are filter off from the light mist, it gave me the different visual harmony that light is almost comes to life within the frame.

Of course, it does the same to the generated light source, creative is on me.

Take the Shot

Thanks to the amazing improvement on digital censor, we wouldn’t able to do this 3 years ago when the problem of fringe is everywhere, and also the increasingly improvement of the dynamic range allow the tone of light expand to its maximum.

I would use wider aperture to avoid possible of capture the light ray, that’s not something I want but it’s your own preferences. In order for optimising the capability of the censor of your camera, RAW is the only format that you should be considered. Manual mode will work better for these work as the light is changing fast but you don’t want to be distracted. I would also tune the exposure +1EV~+2EV to make sure I had all the latitude of the details as I know the camera metering would be fooled by the light source. (Why should you over exposed in digital photography)

Get the best filter you can afford, if you are using one. In my own experience, only the best would avoid any reflection when in this extreme light condition (Hoya is consider bad, whatever cheaper than it or at it’s price range, don’t use). If that’s what you have, just take off the filter.

I would also carefully find the right angle while composing the frame, I would decide how much light I want it to fall. The front object is the key to bring out the best of characteristic. It works best on model portrait too.

I may need fill in flash or reflector for the front object, depending on the situation.

Post Processing

Post processing is as important as taking the shot (another topic to be discussed). I used Adobe Lightroom for all my digital work. For this, I fine tune the colour temperature, further adjust the exposure and brightness, define the colour mode of my liking via Split Toning.

Download

You could download this photo’s preset here.