DO IT YOURSELF: Digital Lighting Basic Portrait Lighting for Digital Camera Users
Most
people who buy a digital camera are disappointed when they try to
take photos of family and friends with their new camera. Just because
they have bought a digital camera the rules of lighting havenāt
changed and lessons learned by many in the past with film cameras
still largely apply. The main problem in both cases is that the
cameras have built-in flash units which are too close to the lens,
and this is even worse with the ultra-small cameras now on the market.
Before
getting into specific pointers on how to improve your photos, letās
talk just a bit about the nature of light. A basic understanding
of how light works will help you to understand how to improve your
photos and equip you with the theoretical knowledge that you can
use to come up with your own ideas to make your photos better.
Light
is really magical stuff. It is the basis of our universe and the
clock to which our universe is set. Remember that the speed of light
seems tied to everything else in the universe, and that the basic
unit of light, the photon, is pure energy. This pure light energy
always travels in a straight line unless something interrupts or
deflects it. The fact that it reflects back from our photo subject
in a straight line to our camera lens is what allows us to make
photographs. But this straight line travel also works against us
when we try to make great photos. See the photo captions for more
about this.
The
intensity of light as it comes from a source, letās say the flash
on our digital camera, falls off rapidly as it travels out into
our scene. It obeys what physicists call the inverse square law,
but you donāt need to worry too much about the technical aspects
of this. You just need to know that a subject which is four feet
from your camera will receive four times as much light as something
which is eight feet away (twice as far away), and 16 times as much
light as something which is 12 feet away (three times as far away).
The practical aspect of this is that your portrait subject four
feet from the camera may be perfectly exposed by the built-in flash,
but the background will not receive sufficient light and will look
dark and dingy. Getting your subject closer to the background can
help minimize this effect.
Most
people who buy a digital camera are disappointed when they try to
take photos of family and friends with their new camera. Just because
they have bought a digital camera the rules of lighting havenāt
changed and lessons learned by many in the past with film cameras
still largely apply. The main problem in both cases is that the
cameras have built-in flash units which are too close to the lens,
and this is even worse with the ultra-small cameras now on the market.
Before
getting into specific pointers on how to improve your photos, letās
talk just a bit about the nature of light. A basic understanding
of how light works will help you to understand how to improve your
photos and equip you with the theoretical knowledge that you can
use to come up with your own ideas to make your photos better. 
Light
is really magical stuff. It is the basis of our universe and the
clock to which our universe is set. Remember that the speed of light
seems tied to everything else in the universe, and that the basic
unit of light, the photon, is pure energy. This pure light energy
always travels in a straight line unless something interrupts or
deflects it. The fact that it reflects back from our photo subject
in a straight line to our camera lens is what allows us to make
photographs. But this straight line travel also works against us
when we try to make great photos. See the photo captions for more
about this. 
The
intensity of light as it comes from a source, letās say the flash
on our digital camera, falls off rapidly as it travels out into
our scene. It obeys what physicists call the inverse square law,
but you donāt need to worry too much about the technical aspects
of this. You just need to know that a subject which is four feet
from your camera will receive four times as much light as something
which is eight feet away (twice as far away), and 16 times as much
light as something which is 12 feet away (three times as far away).
The practical aspect of this is that your portrait subject four
feet from the camera may be perfectly exposed by the built-in flash,
but the background will not receive sufficient light and will look
dark and dingy. Getting your subject closer to the background can
help minimize this effect.
