The Photography Tip of the Week #052

Posted by Philip in Podcast

052 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

Add Drama, Add Interest

Want an easy way to make your photos more interesting?  Add drama.  As a photographer  you have to be a magician and direct the attention of your audience.  There are a couple reasons why magicians use petite attractive women as assistants.  One is that they can fit into small hidden compartments, but the other more important reason is so your attention will be on what the assistant is doing and not on them.  As photographers we have many tools to get people to look where we want.  Focus is the most obvious, what’s in focus is what your eye naturally moves to.  Cropping your image is another, less obvious approach to focus on the subject.  It stands to reason that if you crop out everything but your subject, that’s all the viewer can see.  This is really easy if your subject is rectangular, then all you have to do is crop to the edges, but the last time I checked people weren’t rectangular.  Even though I know a few that are rather two dimensional.  The third answer is light.  Only light your subject and that’s all you can see in the photo, but just lighting your subject doesn’t automatically make it more interesting, it just makes it well lit.  So here is one of the biggest secrets of photography and the funny thing is… it’s not a secret.  If you want to add drama and make your photos more interesting, don’t light your subject evenly.

One of the biggest problems with on-camera flash is that it’s designed to evenly light your subject by throwing a bunch of light forward.  So as photographers we shy away from on-camera flash.  You will hear many photographers say to take the flash off the camera.  If you have a point-and-shoot camera, this is pretty much impossible.  That’s why so many new photographers love to use available light.  They are used to turning off the flash on their point-and-shoot cameras and bringing in light to add depth and dimension to their subject.  If your primary light source is off to the side, you will have a difference between the light and dark side of your subject and add a bit of extra drama and interest.

Here are a few photos from a recent session.  The first is an example of flat lighting.  In this case I used the available light and bounced my flash around the white walls.  This gave me very even lighting around the model.  This sort of lighting is great for fashion and product photography.  This gives you almost no dark shadows, which is perfect for showing off a product but not the sort of lighting to add any drama to the scene.

This next image uses the ambient light, but I have more light coming from the left side of the frame.  This adds a nice light across her face and highlighting her hair, but leaves the rest of the surrounding in shadow.  In this case I don’t want you to focus on the background, I want you to see and focus on her face.  Not only does your eye naturally move to what’s in focus, it also moves to the brightest objects in your scene.  You don’t notice her necklace, her sweater or anything else in the background.

This final image shows a more extreme use of not lighting your subject evenly.  The shadow down the center adds to the drama of the scene and makes many people pause and wonder about the source of the light.  I’m not trying to show  off her dress or any sort of product, so the uneven lighting adds drama and contrast to the image making it much more interesting.  In actuality this was taken in a very well lit room, I overpowered the ambient light to get this look.  Now here’s my little secret, my flash was on the camera for every one of these photos.  I bounced my light through some mirrors to redirect the source of my light to give me the uneven lighting I wanted for these photos.  I hope you can agree they are much more interesting than if they were all lit evenly.