Hey guys! This post is written by Taylor of Taylor Takes a Taste blog. Enjoy! ~jaden

Lighting is the most important element of photography. After all, photography means writing with light. Yes you can buy a super expensive professional camera and lots of expensive lenses, but if you do not know how to control the light, then these are useless. Hopefully these three tips will help you understand how to control the light and make great pictures.

I am going to show you that by controlling:

1. Shadow Contrast

2. Quality

3. Temperature

of the light, you can make the picture that you envisioned.

Shadow Contrast

When setting up a picture, you have to decide what direction you want the light to come from. In this series of images, the light is coming from the right. This is evident by the shadow of the tomato appearing on the left.

Notice how the shadow on the tomato is pretty dark and heavy. This is neither right nor wrong, but say that you want the shadow to be lighter and have less contrast. Right now the image has a very high contrast. If we wanted to decrease this contrast we would have to fill in the shadow. You can do this very easily and inexpensively. All you need is a piece of white foam board, or a white reflector or white poster board. I prefer white foam board because it is cheap, light weight, and I can cut it to any size I need.

You can see here that with the foam board 24 inches away there is a decrease in shadow contrast. You can see more detail in the tomato’s shadows. Now watch as I move the board closer.

Now the foam board is as close to the subject as possible. Notice there is still faint shadow present to show the direction of the light. There is no right nor wrong answer to how much contrast you should have. It all depends on what you want your image to say.

Quality of Light

To describe the quality of light, I am going to use the terms diffused and specular. Diffused light is soft and characterized by very soft shadow edges. Specular light is hard and characterized by very sharp shadow edges. A shadow’s edge is the outline of the shadow that you see. Here is a cupcake as an example.

Notice where I have circled in red. You can see the soft line present in diffused light and a hard line in the specular. There are times when you want specular, while there are times when you want diffused.  Most food shots call for a more diffused light, so that is what I am going to focus on.

To diffuse the light you can use any white translucent fabric. In this example I am usings a bed sheet.

Here is our tomato with just window light.

Now I add the bed sheet to diffuse the light.

Notice how the shadow line on the left side of the tomato has become softer. The bed sheet diffuses the light coming in from the window creating a nice soft shadow line on the tomato.

Color Temperature

Have you ever been asked about a light’s temperature? If you have ,then the person asking you is referring to where light falls on the Kelvin Scale. Basically the scale goes from 0 to 10,000. Light in the 0 range giving off a red color cast and light in the 10,000 range giving off a blue color cast. In the middle the light is white with a neutral cast. Light when it is high noon and clear  outside is around 5,000-5,500 degrees K (different sources will tell you different readings so I am going to average it to 5200K). Your flashes are calibrated to try and be at this temperature. They are by no means perfect, flashes will change color temperature through out the bulb’s life and even while using. One of the reasons why studio strobes can be incredibly expensive is that they will produce a consistent color temperature throughout their use and not change when using.

Tungsten lighting is around 3,200 degress K. This is the lighting you see frequently in your home or restaurants, it has an orange looking glow to it.

So, how do you control for these different lighting conditions ? You do this by changing the white balance in your camera. Every camera is different so consult your manual on how to do this and what the different symbols mean. A mistake some people make is using a white balance setting inappropriate for the lighting condition that they are in. I shot this at night using a daylight balanced flash and a tungsten light.

These lights have completely different temperatures, but by using the appropriate settings, I achieve a neutral look to each. In the Tungsten picture, I shot using the Tungsten setting in my camera. My camera’s manual says this is approx. 3200K. For the Strobe Shot I used the daylight setting which is approx. 5200K.

Here is what happens when you shoot with Tungsten light in the Auto WB mode, Daylight and Tungsten modes.

Notice how the Tungsten Balances setting is the most neutral with Tungsten lights. Here is the same thing with the strobe.

Notice how the Daylight Balanced setting is the most neutral with the strobe. Color temperature again is something that is subjective, but now you know that you can change that temperature by changing the WB setting in your camera.

Hopefully these demonstrations helped you understand how to work with light in order to create the photos that you have envisioned in your mind. I can go into further detail with these topics, but I just wanted to give you the basics. The only way to master these concepts is to practice and keep shooting. So have fun, get creative, and see what you can do with these tools!