With more hours of daylight in summer, it’s important to understand how light affects your images. This tutorial on summer light photography is brought to you by Avantech and Canon.
The golden hours
In photography, only two of the daylight hours are considered special – the hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset. These are called the golden hours.
When the sun rises or sets, it’s near the horizon. This means that light travels through more of the atmosphere than when the sun is overhead. Water particles in the air absorb and scatter blue wavelengths.
The greater the distance the light travels through the atmosphere, the less the amount of blue light reaching the ground. This is why early morning and late evening light is warmer – it takes on a golden hue which suits many subjects.
You might have more or less than 60 minutes available – it depends where you are. Close to the equator, the sun and you have less than an hour of golden light. Near the poles, there are times when the sun never rises much above the horizon and the golden hour can last all day.
Shadow play
As well as a warm light, the low, early morning sun also throws long shadows. These bring out the texture of rough surfaces, especially the fronts of buildings and monuments and statues. Landscapes of hills and fields also benefit from the low angle of the illumination.
As the sun rises in the sky, the shadows become shorter and stronger and are generally less attractive. To eliminate these harsh shadows which can become particularly noticeable under people’s eyes, you can turn on the flash to fill the shadows in. Later in the day, you may have to position your subject in the shade to avoid them squinting and provide a softer light.
Changing light
The quality of daylight changes throughout the day. Outside the golden hours, early morning and late afternoon sunlight still retains a warm colour, though more muted.
Bright sunlight in the middle of the day is much bluer, has more contrast and throws unattractive, short shadows. Cloud cover will soften these effects and give even light.
In addition, the sun appears to move across the sky during the day, so the front of a building that is in shadow in the morning might be bathed in sunlight in the afternoon.
The direction and angle of sun depend on the time of year. Charts and calculators are available which give you this information for any time of day, latitude and longitude.
It’s worth going back to the same subjects at different times of day to see if the picture-taking opportunities have improved when light illuminates it from a different position.
White balance
The colour of light is given a value – colour temperature. This plays an important part in digital photography, though you might be more familiar with the term ‘white balance’. The human eye and brain are very adaptable to the changing colour of light. A sheet of white card will appear white whether you are looking at it outdoors in daylight (bluish) or indoors under the illumination from a tungsten light bulb (yellowish).
Photographic media is not able to adapt in this way and has to be balanced to suit the colour temperature of the prevailing light. The sensor in your camera can be balanced for a wide range of colour temperatures. Settings include daylight, cloudy, tungsten, fluorescent, fluorescent H, flash, underwater and custom. There are settings for daylight and cloudy – that’s because the colour temperature of the light is different in cloudy conditions to normal daylight.
Shooting modes
Photographing on a beach can be tricky using your camera’s automatic mode as the white sand reflects more light than an average subject. The exposure is reduced accordingly, giving a darker result. The beach scene mode on IXUS and PowerShot cameras compensates by increasing the exposure.
PowerShot and IXUS models have smart auto mode with scene detection technology that detects up to 32 scenes automatically and applies the best settings for the optimum result. It’s smart enough to detect the lighting conditions from bright daylight to cloudy, backlit to blue sky. Once the conditions are detected, the relevant settings are applied.
You can also check the exposure of an image after you have taken it using the histogram facility. This creates a graph that shows the distribution of all the tones in the image. If all the tones are bunched to the left, the image is underexposed while bunching to the right demonstrates overexposure. Tones spread across the graph indicate a well-exposed image.
Enter the photo gallery
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