The Power of Light :: Utah Photographer

Now this isn’t a Natural light vs. strobe lighting.  I use natural light photography when appropriate.  There are pluses and minuses for each of them.

Strobe Negatives:

• More equipment needed. [Strobes, Light Stands, Battery/Battery Pack, Umbrellas, Reflectors, Gels, Books]
• More Technical Knowledge which takes time to learn and perfect.  [I'm still learning!]
• Slow moving on a shoot & the need to stage shoots.

Natural Light Negatives:

• Usually constrained to shadowy areas to control light.
• Need to overexpose
• Raccoon Eyes
• Slower shutter speeds
• Lower depth of field [also good!]
• Higher ISO [equals more noise in image]

Strobe Positives:

• Shoot anywhere, anytime.
• More dynamic look to images
• No raccoon eyes!
• Able to more easily obtain correct overall image exposure.  [i.e. not over exposing sky/background/ambient to gain correctly exposed face.]
• Able to add dramatic color to images w/Gels.
• Ability to shoot at higher shutter speeds.
• Lower ISO

Natural Light Positives:

• Bokeh!  [Blurring of the background]
• Speed of movement.  You’re able to keep pace with your subject no matter what they’re doing.
• Less Gear!  But can be more expensive if you invest in great lenses.
• You see the world as the sun [or the natural eye] interprets it.

The above lists were only for shooting not post processing.  Below I’ll go over some post processing issues in each type of scenario.

Right now when I view a lot of local photographers work I always see overexposed faces with lots of blacks added, and heavy saturation.  Some people take it a step further and smooth the skin on the face to much which makes them look plastic.  These photographers are booking, so there is a market for it!  However when I see this type of photography I only see an unskilled photographer in dealing with lighting, or a lazy one.  Of course this is my opinion.

Raccoon Eyes:

The top image is the original picture taken, while the below is over exposing the image by 1 stop.  While this helps bring in their features their eyes are still shadowed.  With this image there isn’t much you can do with it unless you spend 30min-1hour in photoshop dodging out the shadows.  Some might just take this a step further to “save” the image and go one more stop with overexposure.

At this point we’ve lost the detail of their clothing, their faces, and we still have raccoon eyes.  I’ve also had to tweak the black levels, the recovery, and desaturated it a bit because the red tones in the skin become to intense.  Also with more overexposure comes less detail, more noise, and more blur.

Now for a picture with flash vs. natural light.  I know I said it wasn’t this, but I want to illustrate a point.

The first image was taken without a flash, the second with a flash, and the third without a flash with exposure adjustments.

Now we can see what’s happening up close.  The first image was taken with the flash with no photoshop adjustments.  The second was taken without a flash +1 stop exposure, pumping the black in order to bring back some color, and desaturating the reds to compensate for over exposure.  Note with the image on the right the clarity is not good, there is a lot of noise [as if I took the picture with a point and shoot.], and the eyes are still dark.  The image on the right, you can see the brown in his eyes, there is no noise, and the image is nice and sharp.

This also translates in the ability to print large prints past 8×10 as well.  The image on the right would not look good at all in a larger size.  However the image on the right can be printed as large as the customer wants it.

Below is the same scenario.  Can you guess which is which?

Below I’m attempting to clean up the noise, the blur, and bring out the eyes.  Its really hard!

Ok only one more to go.  This is an example of why over exposure doesn’t translate in all situations.  People with darker skin tones … they just can’t be treated with the over exposed look, it just doesn’t look good.

While the effect looks better on the lighter skinned girl, the darker skinned girl starts to look bad even at +1 stop of over exposure.  Her great brown tones turn red and her mouth goes wonky.

If you’ve read this far, thank you.

I’m not going to now go on a tirade on how strobes are better than natural light.  I shoot in both styles.  I only wanted to illustrate that a great photographer is not a one trick pony, but can pull many things out of their bag.  The real test is to know when to pull what out of your bag, and when to leave other things in.

Am I afraid to come out of the shadows?  Not a chance.

More photos available at my Salt Lake Family Photography website

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 at 11:11 pm and is filed under A Day In the Life and tagged with family photography slc, Lighting, Natural Light, Strobe, Utah Family Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.