Supplementary light technology in photography

Supplementary light technology in photography

All professional photographers are magicians, and fill light technology is one of their common magic tricks. What is fill light? How to fill the light? Let's take a look!

The so-called auxiliary lighting technology is to use a flashlight for proper auxiliary lighting when the light is too dark or the light ratio is too large, so as to obtain the lighting effect required by the photographer. Its original use is to overcome the inherent shortcomings of photographic film and paper, because no matter what kind of photosensitive material, compared with the human eye and brain system, the brightness range that can be recorded is much smaller, that is, the contrast range is much narrower.

For example, if you shoot a model with a shadow face outdoors, if you measure the light according to the brightness of the background, many details and layering of the dark part of the model's face will be lost. If the face is exposed normally by increasing exposure, the background will turn white again.

Of course, you can make up for this in darkroom production, or use a computer to adjust the contrast, but the best way is to fundamentally solve the problem, that is, to reduce the contrast between the subject and the background, which is the place where the fill light technology comes into play. All you have to do is use a portable flash. The photos selected here are all taken like this.

Using fill light technology, you will see beautiful eyes when shooting people, and people will look younger and more energetic; When shooting natural scenery, the colors will be brighter and the saturation will be higher. If there is enough flash synchronization speed, electronic flash can solidify people and things in motion. The flash synchronization speed of most 135 SLR cameras does not exceed 1/250 seconds, generally1125 seconds.

When you use flash combined with live light photography (that is, using fill light technology), you will get a clear image under a blurred background, which is called flash ghost. The slower the shutter speed, the more serious the ghost, from the edge of the object to a blur.

The college dance shot by Adrian Collins (figure 1) and the casino scene shot by Jeff Jacobson (figure 2) make effective use of ghosts. Sports photographers often use ghost images when shooting moving bodies. Just look at the photos of air movement people taken by El Leo (Figure 3).