Welcome to another edition of Let’s Talk Photography! Today I’d like to tackle a subject that was suggested by my good friend Don Armstrong who is a member of the Chautauqua County Camera Club and the Audubon Nature Photography Club. Don asked me to talk a little bit about the importance of understanding how to balance the light in your camera and prevent silhouettes in your shots.

As I’ve discussed previously, when you take a photo you are capturing the light that is bouncing off the world around you. In an ideal situation, your main light will be coming from somewhere behind you as the photographer and lighting up your subject. It could be the sun shining down over your shoulder and onto a person or a landscape or it could be the lamps in your living room lighting up the kids opening a birthday gift. No matter what the source of your main light is, you always want that light to bounce off your subject and back into your lens. A preferred setup is to have the light shining in from an angle to help define your subject and add contrasting features that make the subject three dimensional. If the light is directly behind you and bouncing directly off the face of your subject, the shadows will disappear causing the person or object to look flat and without definition. We’ll talk more about lighting setups in a later article.

In some cases, though, you may be trying to capture a moment when there is a beautiful sunset or a bright source of light and you’re trying to get a photo of someone or something in front of that. It would be great if the camera could make all the decisions your brain makes in interpreting light, but, unfortunately, your camera is a bit slow and primitive when it comes to trying to predict what it is you intend to capture.

The camera uses a tool called the Meter to evaluate the light coming into the lens and determine the best exposure for that light. Your camera will have various metering modes that help to guide the camera in lighting the intended subject.

Let’s explore what is going on in the photo of the sailboat. This image was taken at Barcelona in Westfield a few years ago. It’s the not the best photo, but it illustrates the problem. One of the photos shows a really deep red sky with beautiful detail while the sailboat is very dark and doesn’t have much detail to it. The other shows the sky really bright and not so deep and beautiful but the sailboat and the water are brighter and have more detail.

Because of the amount of sky in the photo, the camera made the decision that the bright light coming from the sky was the priority so it metered for the sky. The reason it did this is because I had the camera set up to evaluate the entire scene and meter for the average amount of light that is coming in. I did want to have the image show the beautiful deep reds in the sky so this was a good shot for the sky. But, I also wanted the sailboat so I changed the metering mode to spot metering and reshot the photo. This time, by changing that setting on the camera, I told the camera to meter for the light that is coming from just the center spot in the photo. I pointed that spot at the sailboat and metered then moved the camera to frame the shot. The camera determined that the light was dark, so it adjusted itself to allow more light to come in so the sailboat would be brighter and have more detail. As a result, the sky was really bright and the picture is a bit grainy, but the sailboat is more visible.

The same can be done when you are photographing people in front of a beautiful sky or a lighted display. If the people in your photo come out really dark, then you can change the metering mode in your camera to meter for the people instead of the brighter light. Of course, you could also do this by adjusting your aperture or your shutter speed to allow for more light to enter, but then it would really blow out the brighter areas of your photo.

There is another way to fix this problem and you’ll end up with a much nicer photo than just trying to adjust for the dark areas in the camera and that’s to add a little bit of “Fill Light” to the scene. Fill light is a little bit of light that you add to the photo to bring out the dark areas of the scene without losing the bright light of the sky. This could be the flash that’s on your camera, a flashlight or even the flashlight app on your phone. By adding this light, you preserve the bright light and beautiful colors of the sky while, at the same time, bringing your foreground subject, in this case the people standing in front of the sky, out of the darkness.

Adding a little light allows your camera to see more clearly and it balances out the scene when it is metering for the correct exposure.

I’d like to thank Don for sending in the question and invite you to think about some of the more frustrating things you run into with your photos and send them along. I might be able to figure out a way to help you get the shots you’re looking for.

Until then, happy shooting!

Is there a topic that you’d like to learn more about? Send feedback, share your photos, or offer topic suggestions to talkphotos@ecklof.com. If you’re looking for a place to connect with local photographers in Chautauqua County, search for the group “Shoot ‘n Share Chautauqua” on Facebook.