Master Light Tips - D90 CLUB Training

This is tips I got from Digital Camera Magazine - Master Light.


Once you start getting a feel for light, you’ll search out the times of day where the quality of light is generally at its best – at the start and end of the day during the ‘golden hours’. The sun’s rays have to pass through more of the atmosphere during sunrise and sunset. This fi lters out more of the wavelengths at the blue end of the colour spectrum, leaving us to see wavelengths at the warmer end. This is why the light has a ‘colder’ quality at midday, when the sun is directly overhead and passing through a much thinner part of the atmosphere. A sunset tends to produce a richer, warmer image than a sunrise because atmospheric pollution’s built up throughout the day, scattering the light still further. Sunsets and sunrises are probably the most cliched photographic subjects known to man – but don’t resist capturing a truly breathtaking one when the moment presents itself.

Get there early
Many photographers prefer shooting at dawn – that way they’re not fi ghting against falling light levels as they would be at the end of the day. Lakes and rivers also tend to be more still at this time of the day – perfect for capturing refl ections. Early morning light can have more of a sharper, clearer quality than at sunset – and shadows tend to creep on you rather fast at the end of the day. For those of us holding down a day job, it’s unlikely that we can escape work commitments to catch the sunset on a regular basis – but getting up early and getting out before the sun rises can be an option. You need to make sure you’re in position and
ready to start shooting before the sun actually clips the horizon though, as the ‘magic’ light only lasts for a few minutes. Don’t include the sun’s bright orb in your frame when you’re metering – it’s likely to cause severe underexposure in your shot. Instead, take a spot meter reading from a bright area of sky, lock the reading in and recompose with the sun back in the frame. Bracket exposures at +/- 0.5EV around this initial exposure.

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