I am a Licentiate of the Royal Photographic Society and hope to take my Associateship whenever I can find the time.
Beyond writing, I am a professional portrait, travel and documentary photographer, and reached the finals of the 2016 Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year competition. This has been a wonderful learning experience and very influential on my photography. As well as being lucky enough to get paid to write about photography, I've been fortunate to interview some of the greatest photographers in the world, including Elliott Erwitt, Don McCullin, Martin Parr, Terry O'Neill and Steve McCurry. During my time as editor it became the UK's top selling photo monthly and won Print Publication of the Year at the 2013 British Media Awards. Before that I served as the editor of Digital Camera, Britain's best-selling photography magazine, for five years. I am a journalist and photographer and currently work as the Deputy Editor of Amateur Photographer (AP) the oldest weekly photographic magazine in the world. Michael is an award-winning photographer, author and teacher and will give you detailed feedback on your photographs as you progress through the course.
If you want to learn about all aspects of photography, and develop your own portfolio and style as you learn, join Michael Freeman on his Photography Foundation course today. Too much flash and you run the risk of losing the sense that there’s any backlighting at all. The strength of the flash will determine the balance between the exposure for the background and your subject. If you don’t want to create a silhouette then you’ll need to also illuminate your subject.įlash is one of the easiest way to do this, a technique known as fill-in flash. However, it’s less so when your subject’s shape is more ambiguous. Strong backlighting usually results in a silhouette. If the shape of your subject is strong this can be very effective.
Silhouettes look flat, almost like a cardboard cut-out. If your subject obscures the light source - and if you expose for the background rather that your subject – the result will be a silhouette. Backlightingīacklighting is caused when the light source is behind the subject shining towards the camera. Note the attractive rim lighting around the back of the lamb. One solution is to use a reflector or supplementary light to gently illuminate the shadow side (the key is to lighten the shadows without overpowering them).Īlthough this lamb is backlit there was enough ambient light to ensure that contrast wasn't too high. One side will be more strongly illuminated than the other (the contrast will be greater the harder the light is but the principle holds true even for softer light). Early morning or late afternoon light raking across the landscape is perfect for emphasising texture. Side lighting doesn’t evenly illuminate your subject. Of the three directions, side lighting creates the strongest sense that a subject has three dimensions. In terms of helping to convey a subject’s shape and form this is ideal. This means that one side of a subject will be lit and the other side will be in shadow. Side lighting is light that falls on a subject at roughly ninety degrees to the camera. Side lighting helps to define the shape of your subject Side lighting Frontal light lacks drama, making a photo look more like a record shot and be less interesting for this reason. Without shadows a subject’s shape becomes more ambiguous.
Shadows help to give a sense of shape and form to a subject. The shadows cast by frontal light are behind the subject, out of sight from the camera’s point of view. It evenly illuminates your subject so metering is fairly straightforward. Built-in or on-camera flash is a frontal light. Frontal lightingįrontal lighting is lighting that emanates either from behind the camera or from the camera itself. Let’s go through the three directions in order. The three directions have a different effect on how three-dimensional your subject appears to be due to the that shadows are cast. There are essentially three directions: frontal, side and backlighting. The simplest of light’s qualities is its direction relative to your camera.
Learn to shoot like a pro in this photography foundation course led by the best selling photography author on Amazon. Photography Foundation taught by Michael Freeman