The Photography Tip of the Week #045

Posted by Philip in Podcast

045 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

Catch that eye

In a previous tip, I stressed the importance of focusing on the eyes in portrait photography. Obviously having the eyes in focus is key. But there are secondary factors that greatly enhance the photo, kind of like adding salad dressing to a salad. Sure salads are great without dressing, but they are a lot more tasty with dressing. In much the same way we can add some salad dressing to our portrait photos using a catch light.

Catch lights are those bright spots and reflections you sometimes see in peoples eyes. They are the reflections of lights or brightly lit objects. These catch lights help draw attention to your subject’s eyes.  In most cases they are the brightest spots in your photos and thus draw attention.  To illustrate this I decided to take just one photo and show you the difference.  This girl was at a recent baby shower I shot.  She was very bright an cheery the whole time and this particular shot is how I would have normally processed the image in Lightroom or Camera Raw.  You can see the brightness even in her eyes.
If you zoom in close you’ll see that the catch light is extremely small, because it’s coming from a small bounce card on my flash.  Even such a little hot spot is enough to give you that sense of reflection and moisture that makes you realize that she is a very real and vibrant child.
Now I’d like to show you the same image, processed in such a way to downplay the highlights.  I’ve even removed the catch lights from her eyes.  The bright and cheery personality that was captured originally, suddenly becomes rather creepy and disturbing.  If I showed this image to a hundred people they would have that same sense that something was odd about the photo, but they won’t know what.
If you look at the closeup, there is nothing that stands out as being incorrect or inaccurate about the eye.  It just looks rather flat.  The eye no longer shows any depth.  So if you are noticing that your portrait style photos are lacking  depth and seem flat, add a bright light source in such a way to create that important catch light.  In a future blog posting I’ll go into different ways of creating catch lights of different shapes and sizes.  So keep a lookout on the site for that added bonus.