Light: The Photographer’s Medium

A combination of 2 Greek roots, photography literally means “drawing with light”. Every art form has a medium, be it tangible, such as paint, plaster, or clay, or perceptual, such as sound or light. Understanding your medium is one of the first steps to mastering an art form. Remember in elementary school when your art teacher explained the color wheel? The same goes for photography, in order to master it, you must first understand light.

Momentary nerdy interlude: light is an electromagnetic (EM) wave, encompassing everything from radio waves to microwaves. Most photography, however, deals only with visible light, which is only a tiny fraction of the spectrum, with wavelengths ranging from ~390 to 700 nanometers. Our eyes and cameras perceive light in the same basic way, allowing the EM waves to enter the lens and strike a sensor on the inside, which registers the specific signal or ‘energy’ of each wave and combines them using a computing system to form the image that you perceive.

Returning from nerd land, the point is that light is a complex medium in itself, and that as a photographer, you must understand how it works in order to use it.

The first thing to understand is that light has a quality. It can be hard or soft, dim or bright, warm or cool, dispersed or direct. Each of those aspects contributes to the overall quality of the light, which will affect the tone of your image. Let’s break that down.

Hard, bright, warm, and direct light coming straight from the setting sun on the right; hard, dim, warm, and disperse light fading on the left side of the composition

Firstly, light can be hard or soft. Hard light is the light you get from a direct flash, or on a bright, sunny day. It’s typically harsher, crisper, and sharper. It is not the type of light that will give you your typical flattering portrait. It creates strong edges, lines, and definition, often highlighting every little detail. It gives the feeling of freezing the moment, a snap of time. Hard light can be useful. It is dramatic, provides high contrast, and gives more definition between light and shadow; but when used incorrectly, it can also draw the life out of an image.

Soft light, on the other hand, is more gentle. It caresses the subject, allowing highlights and shadows to blend into one another, smoothing the image. It pulls attention away from the tiny details, and is often used for portraits because of these qualities. Soft light creates a flow, a feeling of being in time, not freezing it. It is often used to create a calmer, more peaceful image.

Soft, dim, cool, direct light on these mudflats

Bright light is often equated with hard light, and can have many of the same qualities. However, it is not identical. bright light just means the light is more intense. Think about a cloudy day that’s still so bright you have to wear sunglasses. That’s bright light that is also soft, evened out by the clouds.

Dim light, on the other hand, just means there is less light. Often associated with soft light, it is usually gentler than its counterpart, and results in less illumination of the subject. But dim light can be hard as well. Think about the last rays of sun before it sets. the light is hard, casting defined shadows, but it is also much less bright than the beams of sunlight that struck the same way earlier in the day.

While the brightness of light is not as important in evoking emotion in an image, it does contribute to how the image is made, and often affects the settings one must use to get a usable photo (technology has alleviated, but not eliminated, this issue.)

Warm and cool describe the hue of the light. Warmer light will be more orange, red, or yellow, whereas cooler light is more blue, green, or purple. Sometimes the hue of the light is something you just want to neutralise in white balance, as is often the case with indoor lighting, but it can also be a powerful part of the emotion in an image. This is especially prevalent during the blue and golden hours, and is one of the reasons photographers love to shoot at those times.

Warmer light feels cozy, comforting, maybe more energetic. It often feels more alive, joyful. Cooler light on the other hand is calm, serene, peaceful. It can feel sleepy, or even gloomy.

Dim, soft, cool, dispersed light in this image brings the viewer into the moment

Dispersed or direct describes how the light is hitting the subject. Is it coming from all around them (dispersed), from just one place, or from multiple defined sources (direct)? Dispersed light would be the light in a field at midday on either a sunny or cloudy day. You can see the sun is above you, but the light still seems to be hitting you from all around. Direct light would be the light from a flash or a beam (see setting sun above). It hits the subject from a specific direction, or directions, and you can tell by looking at the image where the light is coming from.

So to recap: we have hard, soft, bright, dim, warm, cool, disperse, and direct light. These characteristics can be combined in any number of ways to bring out or create different qualities in a photo, just as a painter may blend the colors of her palette. This is by no means a comprehensive analysis of how light behaves, nor even a full list of how to classify it. These are just the 4 main categories I find most helpful (and always consider) when I am drawing with light.