Harnessing and Utilizing Natural lighting in Photography and Cinema.

Lighting is one of the key component to cinema and photography, lighting can convey mood, emotions, create contrast and depth. Lighting can be one of the most important element in visual storytelling. In this reading let’s take a look at some natural lighting and how it play a role within a composition.

Natural Light is considered light that comes from the source being the sun, when used thoughtfully it can be such a powerful and beautiful form of light within your composition. Natural light is alive, is a form of light that is constantly in motion and give life to all that we know in this world. There’s beauty within the process of capturing natural lighting.

Learning how to use natural hard light or soft light will take your visual composition to places where you might surprise your self. Artificial lighting has its own beautiful and positive quality to them as well, we will go into this in a future reading, in this reading we will focus on natural lighting.

By the end of this reading, I hope you go out there and capture some natural lighting, explore and see how you are able to capture intriguing lights. Find the beauty that natural light has to offer!

“Hope”, Street Photography 2021, Darith.

In this photograph we are able to recognize that it follow the rules of third we learned in the past reading, and the warm sun light gently lay on the building on the right side of the frame. This convey a warm feeling, and create contrast to the overall image. Most of the composition are in the mid-tone, and shadow, the highlight of the sun ray draw the focus point towards the subject on the right.

When I’m out capturing photos, I often look to capture light itself. For me focusing on capturing light, helps me to capture a compostion that is pleasing visually. From this point I can use the composition to place a subject within it to further a certain story. In this case, the building will act as the subject. I was able to utilize the sun light to draw focus towards the subject and also create an emotional impact with the use of natural light.

Street Photography, Darith.

In this portrait of a landscape photograph, backlighting was use to create drama to further the grand and the beauty of these Yucca brevifolia trees. Backlighting is when you place the light source behind your subject, illuminating the subject from the back. By doing so, the subject gets this glow effect of highlight around them. The cast shadow are created by hard back lighting, the lighting in this image is hard enough to create cast shadow but still hold some gentleness(golden hour) to them to allow the light to be gentle and elegant, the shadow create more drama within the composition.

Street Photography 2021, Darith Beng.

Paying attention to lighting, and how they interact with the world around us will give a new perspective on how you compose an image. Light travel and bounce in interesting ways, by being mindful to viewing lights in a compositional frame point of view will greatly allow you to harness lights and utilize them to convey the message you want to use it for.

Lighting also create contrast within an image, with contrast comes depth. Depth is an element in film and photography, it helps creates a more 3 dimensional image, and visual interest.

These are what you consider hard lighting, where the light cast a define shadows known as Cast Shadow. The harder the light source the harder the shadow will be. Often times in portrait photography where your subject is human being, soft lighting can be beneficial in creating a more flattering look to the subject. However hard lighting can also be great in their own right as well when done correctly with the correct context/purpose.