Harsh Light?

Don’t let the sun be your frenemy, flip over to find out what we learned about shooting midday, in Australia.

WRITTEN BY CLARA JACOBSEN

Shooting in harsh light can be tricky even for the most experienced photographers. You can recognize it by the strong shadows, excessive contrast, blown highlights, and most prominently, squinting eyes. Harsh light is a very, very bright directional light, typically found during the middle of the day when the sun is shining its brightest. Therefore, casting strong dark shadows creating very defined lines onto or near the people you are photographing, you might even find your subjects squinting against the sun instead of having the relaxed natural expressions you wanted for the image. Sometimes we find ourselves shooting in unideal places where avoiding the sun can seem impossible, this article is going to help share a few tricks for making that harsh light work!

The opposite of light is dark so perhaps the simplest way to avoid harsh light would be thide from it under shade, however, not all shade is created equal. There’s man-made and natural shade and by paying attention to the shadows of your subjects you could understand and determine the position of the sun and from which the light is hitting, often being more than one. This is a key part in photographing in harsh light as knowing how and where to position your clients is very important so that the sun is not casting strong shadows across their face. The background becomes especially important when looking at contrasts. Check how certain surroundings will work with you and your client.

Not only can shade be used as a diffuser but reflectors are a great way to reduce that harsh light and contrast between your subject and the surrounding area. The important part of a reflectors job is to provide more light to an appointed area where you are wanting to fill a bit more. Reflectors can be used almost anywhere such as open sun, a combination or shaded areas, as well as come in many different sizes and colours. A natural reflector can be any neutral coloured object that can serve to bounce light back onto your subject whereas white reflectors will bounce back the same colour light that’s around you, silver will bounce back stronger and higher contrast light, gold will warm the light being sent back and black will actually absorb it.

Using a strong backlight! Another helpful tip for shooting during the harsh hours of the day is to utilize a backlight. Keeping it simple by having your subject between you and the sun to minimize any direct sunlight entering the lens. When working with backlighting, there will always be some parts of your subject that will have some direct light from the sun. But to make sure you’re not overexposing any details, enable the highlight warning on your camera (generally found in the setup menu), this warning will then flash on highlights that are blown out.

Another issue which frequently occurs in harsh lighting is overexposure. When too much light enters the camera, it causes the photo to be washed out thus creating the overexposure. Cameras have the ability to change the settings to control the lighting coming in and out. Such as the shutter speed can control the amount of the time the shutter is open, and the ISO controls the sensitivity of the internal senor. By increasing the shutter speed, you decrease the amount of time light has to enter the lens and lowering the ISO you lower the sensors sensitivity. Both of these camera techniques will help you to avoid overexposure. If you need to, underexpose your images and fix them in editing. Always shoot in RAW of course and this will help you so much.