What are side light, backlight and artificial light?

Introduction: If you want to be more comfortable with light control, you need to have a more thorough understanding of the three basic lights: forward light, side light and backlight. Let’s learn together!

Artificial light (artificial light)

Side light can come from artificial light sources, such as lamps or flashlights, of course it can also be the sun Light. Reasonable use of artificial light can effectively prevent the subject from facing the light, thereby reducing the light directly shining on the character's face, thereby increasing the depth of field of the picture. Below are photos of people I took using metering from three aspects.

A fatal mistake made by many inexperienced photographers is to attempt to take portraits of people in bright sunshine at noon. The light of the midday sun is too strong, bringing too many shadows to the picture. The light does not have any feeling of warmth, making the picture look lifeless.

Shooting in the late afternoon allows the photographer to use only natural light. The light at this time is directly projected on the subject's face, which can make the face look very delicate and also give the portrait a certain depth of field.

Use artificial light, such as a flash with a diffuser (the artificial light in this case is comparable to the natural light that falls on the subject through a window during the day) and then position it to the camera Rear (the rear here is defined relative to the subject) and turn on the flash to shoot. This way, the light in the frame is very even because the light hits the subject's face equally from the camera's angle.

Now, we take away the flash on the right side of the subject, and we will take a photo with only one side shining brightly.

In this picture, the diffuser is moved to the right side of the subject, so that the subject's face has a clear shadow. I think this kind of light is undesirable.

Next, use the flash to increase the light from the side, and use the reflector to fill in the shadows. We will get a very bright photo. However, for such a perfect picture we only need to use one main light source, and our backlight can use sunlight or other ambient light. For this portrait, I manually focused the exposure on the wall behind the figure to make it the contrast of the picture.

To achieve the effect in the picture, we can use natural light as backlight and reflector as the core light source (the core light source is the main light source, which can be the sun, flash, desk lamp, or any other main light source) luminous object).

Using as little light as possible can often achieve very good results. Using a main light source, exposing for ambient light, and using a reflector to brighten the shadows should be enough to get a very good-looking photo.

This method does not require the use of more lights, a reflector is enough. But the effect of the pictures taken looks like it can be achieved by using multiple lights. Now you can easily understand why many photographers carry reflectors. When photographing people, adding, controlling or changing the light provides photographers with a variety of options.