LIGHTING - Natural, artificial, a mixture of both

The quality of light has the power to change your subject in its setting from the mundane to the extraordinary and vice versa. It’s almost magical that an ordinary object at midday that you may normally not bother to look at, will draw you to it at a different time of day, simply becasue of how different it appears. And that in a nutshell, is the world of the photographer, it’s what things look like that motivates us.

When you appreciate how light will affect your composition, you really start to see the world from a new perspective. If your camera is your paint brush, then lighting and the times of day are your palette - they are the colours you choose to work with. These vary in the extreme, so you need to know their behaviour and how you can use them in your work. Lighting can draw out our emotions and our activities. So with that in mind, lets start with the three types of lighting conditions; natural, artificial and a mixture of both.

Natural lighting

If your subject is lit only by the sun the moon or the stars, to the exclusion of any man made lighting, then it is being illuminated by natural lighting. This can occur any time of day or night, in any weather conditions, from any angle and any subject. So it has a very wide latitude and what’s more, it is free!

Wetlands, Western Australia

The Black Mountains, Wales

Desert storm, Northern Territory, Australia

Mt Nguaruhoe, New Zealand

Mt Ol Doinyo Lengaï , Tanzania

Never castle, Kent UK

Moonlit beach, Castlecliff, New Zealand

Roussillon, France

Pont d'Ain, France

The moon, St Guilhem le Desert

Artificial lighting

If a scene is lit only by man made lighting, then it is termed artifical illumination. This can be any form of lighting including camera flash, tungsten, neon, sodium vapour, halogen, candle, fire, or a mixture of them all. The point being that there should be no natural light visible.

The guitarist was lit by two studio flash lights with a soft box difusers. The singer is illuminated by a number of light sources, frontal, above, behind and to the side. The spiral staircase in the Vatican museums has a mixture of tungsten lighting with neon (daylight balanced) illumination from above.
The shots inside and outside the submarine are lit solely by the artificial lighting at the location, not from my camera or any external photographic lighting. With artificial lighting, if it is not your lighting, then someone else is paying for it. By comparison to natural lighting, it is not free.

The guitarist, studio shot

Vatican Museums, Rome

Red Sky rock band

On board HMAS Rankin, RAN Collins class submarine

RAN Collins class submarines

Actor Karim El Hakim, lit by studio flash

Cafe, tungsten and candle light

Mixture of both

The image in Nannup, Western Australia, represents a mixture of natural and artificial lighting. Complimentary colours are well in evidence here which only adds to the overall atmosphere. Although there is still some blue left in the sky, the shot is defined mainly by artificial lighting. This includes incadescent and neon lights plus sodium vapour street lights. These are all ‘found’ images, meaning I have not added any lighting apart from what existed at the location. In all these cases the sky defines the background.