Category Archives: Light and Lighting

For those who don’t know, the DIY Photography equipment niche has gone from strength to strength recently, as more people [...]

What is Light Graffiti? It’s pretty simple really. You take a long exposure, and use a light source to paint [...]

I personally love using beauty dishes; they’re my favourite lighting modifier, and produce some awesome results. They can be picked up with a lighting stand, and a grid, for only £100, and you will notice the difference immediately. One thing you will need though (if you want to use a full sized one) is a way of shooting with your flash off-camera, whether that’s wirelessly, or wired.

Window light is an excellent, and free light source, that can achieve the same effects as much bigger, and more [...]

I posted some photos on Facebook recently which went up completely unedited, just a couple hours after being taken, that were lit with a simple $3 torch. Most of the people that I’ve showed the photo don’t quite understand how you can get such great results with such basic gear, but I’m going to show you exactly how it’s done.

Low key photography is when you take a photo of a subject, and everything (or almost everything) except the subject in black. This can be achieved fairly easily and in brightly lit situations; it’s just all about having the right settings on your camera. It’s a cool technique which is useful for focusing the viewers attention onto a certain part of the photo, which is usually the subject. Here’s how it’s done.

This post is all about showing you how to take a great photo, at night, in very low light. This may not sound particularly difficult, but I assure you that if you try to shoot in auto mode, or even a priority mode then you would massively struggle to produce the same results. It’s not hard when you know what you’re doing, and that’s exactly what I aim to achieve from this post.

The general idea is that you find a way of syncing you camera with your flash so that you can take it off of your camera and illuminate your subject for a different angle. You’ll need a separate, off camera flash, but there’s plenty of choice to suit your budget and needs. When you take your flash off your camera, you open up a whole load of different options when it comes to diffusing the light through various umbrellas, softboxes and beauty dishes.

Natural light is type of lighting that we’re all very familiar with, but have you ever actually stopped for a moment to think about the effect that it has on your photography and how you can use it to your advantage? The difference between studio lighting or flashes and natural light is that we have very little control over it and its unpredictable nature, meaning that we have work work around it.

Shooting at night for me, came about from the fact that I didn’t really have too much free time in the day, so I would go out and practice my photography with some friends at night. It’s a slightly harder skill to master because the shots take longer to expose, I liken it to shooting on film; you think a lot more about your settings and composition before you shoot, which helps you to hone in your skill much quicker.