NEBRASKAland Magazine is dedicated to outstanding photography and informative writing with an engaging mix of articles and photos highlighting Nebraska’s outdoor activities, parklands, wildlife, history and people.
Issue link: http://mag.outdoornebraska.gov/i/1387349
36 Nebraskaland • July 2021 and bright overcast periods produce much less intense light, giving your camera a chance to capture the entire range of tones in a scene. Coincidentally, those periods are also when the light quality tends to be highest as well. Light Quality There are several factors that contribute to good light quality in photography. Intensity is an important one, but two others are color and direction. In outdoor photography, color is determined by the path the sun's rays take on the way to your subject. Early and late in the day, when the sun is low in the sky, it usually has a golden or reddish appearance because of how much of the atmosphere its light passes through before you see it. During the middle of a sunny day, that light is very white, as well as bright. The color of the light hitting a subject infl uences the color bouncing off that subject — which is what your camera captures. If you look at the sun (don't look at the sun) and see color, that color will show up in your photo too. Bright overcast light is coveted by many photographers because it creates beautiful even lighting on a subject. When the sun passes through clouds but still creates faint shadows, it creates the kind of diff used light that portrait photographers pour lots of time and equipment to creating artifi cially. Bright overcast light is fantastic for close-up photos with gorgeous saturated color and fi ne detail, as well as for portrait-like photos of certain subjects. It works less well for large landscape photos because the lack of contrast across the scene can make it look relatively fl at. In addition, if the sky is included in a landscape photo, it usually comes out as a vast expanse of boring monotone light gray. In addition to color and diff usion, the orientation of the sun's rays relative to you and your subject also are important. A subject or scene looks very diff erent when the sun is behind you, versus in front of you. Much of that is determined by the number and size of the shadows visible in the image. While photography is simpler when the sun is directly behind you, some of the most striking photographs are made when it's not. Shadows help defi ne texture in an image. When the sun is behind you, the shadows are behind the subjects you're photographing, making the scene look relatively fl at. However, when the sun comes across the scene from the side, the resulting shadows emphasize the contours and patterns in the photo. When that light is too intense, shadows can be problematic, but when the camera can pick up both the bright and shadowed portions of a scene, those shadows can A bright overcast day provided perfect lighting for this bison photo. Higher intensity light would have made it diffi cult to expose correctly for both the dark face and bright wildfl owers around it.