Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.” — Mary Oliver
It doesn’t matter what you call it—available light, unavailable light, available darkness, or low light photography—often the most rewarding images you can make are produced when shooting under challenging lighting conditions.
Why is that?
I think one of the positive aspects of available light photography is the thrill of overcoming the ever-present technical obstacles that sometimes challenge you to produce a well-exposed image under less-than-ideal lighting conditions. Then there’s the fact that photographs made under difficult lighting situations look a lot different and maybe have more impact than the classic instruction sheet admonition of “f/16 and the sun over your right shoulder.”
It seems to me that many travel photographs are made during the middle of the day. Whether you’re on the road or making photographs while closer to home, if you take the time to seek out other times of the day and under less than perfect “Sunny 16” lighting situations, it will let you produce photographs that look different from the rest of the packs.
How I Made this image: I photographed this image in a wooded area just outside a tea house that was located on the outskirts of Tokyo, Japan where a group of photographers and writers had just had a delightful dinner. The camera used was a Canon Digital Rebel with an EF-S 18-55mm f/4-5.6 IS STM lens (at 18mm) with an exposure of 0.3 sec (hand held) at f/3.5 and ISO 1600 and a minus two-thirds stop exposure compensation. The image is not perfectly sharp but I did the best I could to capture the mood just outside the tea house. If you happen to see a potential photograph, that like this, that needs a slow shutter speed and a tripod is not handy, go for it anyway and make multiple exposures. One of them may be sharper than the other even if none ate perfectly sharp.
One of my favorite suggestions for traveling photographers is to try make a different kind of photograph every day. When I’m at home here on Daisy Hill, I like to take a walk around a nearby lake or maybe at McCabe Meadows and I will usually take a camera along with me because I never know what I’ll encounter. When traveling, I take a similar walk at night because scenes like the one above can often present themselves, just waiting to be captured. That’s how I made the cover shot in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico around midnight for the cover of the book (below) about available light photograph that I coauthored with Barry Staver.
A few more tips: To make successful low light images you’ll want to start with a combination of fast lenses and higher-than-normal ISO settings often combined with a slow shutter speed. Luckily there’s no problem with color shifts caused by reciprocity failure with digital photography as there can be is with color film. You can always shoot available light photography at a low ISO setting, such as ISO 200, when using a tripod. Hand held, you’ll probably want to bump up your camera’s ISO settings when the light is low. How much will be determined by how much digital noise, exacerbated at slow shutter speeds and high ISO settings, you can tolerate.
If you enjoyed today’s blog post and would like to treat Joe to a cup of Earl Grey tea ($2.50), click here. And if you do, many thanks.
Along with photographer Barry Staver, Joe is co-author of Better Available Light Digital Photography that’s out-of-print but new copies are available for $21.50 or used copies starting around twelve bucks—from Amazon, as I write this.