David Busch’s Nikon D500 Guide to Digital SLR Photography by David D. Busch

Author:David D. Busch [Busch, David D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rocky Nook
Published: 2016-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

8

Making Light Work for You

While this chapter provides an introduction to using continuous lighting (such as daylight, incandescent, or fluorescent sources), it’s useful to first consider how that form of illumination compares to the brief, but brilliant snippets of light we call electronic flash, which I’ll cover in Chapters 9 and 10.

Continuous lighting is exactly what you might think: uninterrupted illumination that is available all the time during a shooting session. Daylight, moonlight, and the artificial lighting encountered both indoors and outdoors count as continuous light sources (although all of them can be “interrupted” by passing clouds, solar eclipses, a blown fuse, or simply by switching a lamp off). Indoor continuous illumination includes both the lights that are there already (such as incandescent lamps or overhead fluorescent lights indoors) and fixtures you supply yourself, including photoflood lamps or reflectors used to bounce existing light onto your subject.

Electronic flash is notable because it can be much more intense than continuous lighting, lasts only a brief moment, and can be much more portable than supplementary incandescent sources. It’s a light source you can carry with you and use anywhere. There are advantages and disadvantages to each type of illumination. Here’s a quick checklist of pros and cons:

Lighting preview—Pro: continuous lighting. With continuous lighting, you always know exactly what kind of lighting effect you’re going to get and, if multiple lights are used, how they will interact with each other. If the natural light present in a scene is perfect for the image you’re trying to capture, you’ll know immediately (see Figure 8.1).

Lighting preview—Con: electronic flash. With flash, the general effect you’re going to see may be a mystery until you’ve built some experience, and you may need to review a shot on the LCD monitor, make some adjustments, and then reshoot to get the look you want. (In this sense, a digital camera’s review capabilities replace the Polaroid test shots pro photographers relied on in decades past.) An image like the one in Figure 8.1 would have been difficult to achieve with an off-camera battery-powered flash unit, because it would be tricky to preview exactly how the shadows would fall without a true continuous modeling light.

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