A Guide to Landscape Photography and Light: Section 1 - Quality of Light

Golden light over the Great Ridge at Mam Tor in the Peak District, UK. But is it hard light or soft light?

Photography of any kind begins with light. Light is the key fundamental. It is our raw ingrediant as photographers. Whilst Landscape Photography doesn’t allow for us to change the light on a whim, we can still take control of it through our understanding of how light will impact our landscape photographs.

Light creates visual mood and atmosphere within our photographs. It’s also responsible for texture, contrast, yes even ‘sharpness’. By understanding a few key principle of light, we can start to take control and determine the impact of light within our photographs. And we’re starting with what is referred to as light quality.

All light is good light.

When photographers refer to the quality of light, we are not using the term to descern good or bad light. We are referring to the quality of the light as being hard or soft. Quite often photographers will also talk about things like diffused light or specular light, golden light or flat light. However these terms are not qualities of light and we will cover them in further sections.

There are two qualities of light: hard light and soft light. But these are not as defined as you may think. In fact, quite often the quality of light is termed in reference to the other, harder or softer. And there are gradations in between the two.

What defines hard or soft light?

In simple terms, hard light produces harder, well defined shadows with high levels of contrast. Soft light at it’s softest will produce little to no shadow with much reduced contrast.

It is the transition between highlights and shadows that is impacted by the quality of light hitting your subject. This is why recognising the quality of light you are photographing in can make a huge difference to how you photograph.

The sun shining down like a spotlight over the Lake District, UK

How is soft light or hard light created?

Light quality is determined by the size of the light source relative to the subject being photographed (the key word here is relative), the larger the light source, the softer the light.

As landscape photographers, our light is sent from the sun and the sun is huge. It’s so big that it would engulf the earth 1.3 million times before being full, that’s pretty darn big! So that must be a soft light then? As mentioned above, the key word is ‘relative’.

The sun sits more than 150 million kilometres away from the earth, so whilst it is unimaginably huge, it is also unimaginably far away. And from our perspective here on earth it actually appears quite small. An easy way to understand this is if you hold out your hand at arms length in between your eyes and the sun. Your hand easily covers it. So despite it’s super huge size, the distance makes it, relative to our perspective, fairly small.

And that’s the reason that the sun is a small light source producing hard light for most of the day.

MOST of the day?

Earlier in this article I wrote that our light for landscape photography is ‘sent by the sun’. I wrote it this way on purpose because, to understand how we get soft light, we have to stop seeing the sun as our only light source.

The softest light we are likely to achieve in favourable landscape photography conditions comes during a time frame known as blue hour. Blue hour exists for a short time before sunrise and after sunset (mostly for much less than an hour!) and occurs at a time when the sun is below the horizon and we are no longer receiving rays of light directly from the sun onto the land. But we do still have light.

Blue hour in the Lake District, UK. With very subtle highlight to shadow transition, this is a great time of day to photograph under soft light

So what’s the source of this light?

Despite the sun being below the horizon, its light rays are still hitting our atmosphere and these light rays get reflected down onto the land below it. In this respect, the atmosphere has now become our light source. And, as the earths atmosphere covers the entire sky above us, it is a much larger light source than the sun. Hold your hand up again at arms length, you can still see the sky all around it right?! That’s because, relatively speaking, it is much bigger than the sun.

It is because of this relative large size that we get soft light with soft shadows. The larger light source is reflecting light in multiple directions and it is those multi directional rays that create much softer light than at any other time of day. The light ‘wraps’ around the land, reducing shadows and contrast.

Cloudy Day? Soft Light!

Cloudy skies. Note the dimished power of the light, also the lack of any hard shadows and reduced contrast in the image

Now transfer this idea to a cloudy day. Forget the idea that the clouds are ‘diffusing’ the light. If we can’t see the sun then the clouds are the light. And if the clouds cover the entire sky then they are a large light source producing soft light. Again, full cloud cover will create multi-directional rays to wrap around the land removing shadows and decreasing contrast. They also diminish the strength of the light.

Above the clouds, the sun is streaming down its rays in the same way and at the same ‘power’ it always does, it is the clouds that reflect some of that light back, reducing the light making it down to us on the land. This will mean that our camera settings need to change to take that diminished light into consideration.

Hard light, Soft light.

We now know that the sun produces hard light whenever it is the only (or most powerful) source of light. But we also understand that when the sun interacts with things closer to earth such as our atmosphere or weather conditions, and we can no longer see direct sunlight, that they become the relative light source.

Right at the start of this article I stated that neither of the qualities of light are definites. That’s because they are relative terms. Even when the sun is at its highest point in the sky, on a clear sky day, its rays are still interacting with our atmosphere, they are still reflecting, defracting and bouncing. That is why we can still see into shadows and it is why, even on the sunniest of days, we still never get a completely defined shadow line. You can actually produce a much harder light in the studio where light bounce and reflections can be controlled and minimised.

And whilst blue hour produces beautifully soft light, by definition, there is even softer light to be found on a moonless night. There is zero transition between highlights and shadows then, because there are no highlights.

A cloud inversion from above looks marvellous and sunny and we can see the reflected light coming back off the clouds and the swift transitions from highlight to shadow caused by the hard light of the sun. The town underneath the clouds will be much darker with super soft shadows due to the cloud coverage acting as the light source.

So the qualities of light are interchangeable even in the landscape. Light quality is harder or softer only in relation to itself.

The harder the light, the more defined the shadows, abrupt transition between highlights and shadows and therefor stronger contrast.

The softer the light, the less defined shadows, smoother transitions between highlights and shadows and lower contrast.

In section two we’ll be discussing the qualities of reflection and how to harness their impact upon your photography. Make sure to sign up for the newsletter below.

Dave

Photography and The Secrets of Light

To really start to elevate our photography we first need to unlock the secrets of light. Light is, without doubt, the most important element of photography, far higher up the pecking order than any piece of camera equipment that we could buy. If our sensor (or film) is nothing more than a blank canvas, then light is the brush waiting to paint that canvas with mood, colour, atmosphere, depth, dimension, and visual magic.

As photographers we are light chaser. And once we begin to think of photography as the harnessing of light, we’ll take our passion for getting out and taking photographs to a whole new level of awe-inspiring visual stories.

Colour, mood, depth and form. All created by the light

Understanding light is crucial for landscape photography because light is photography. It’s fundamental in shaping composition, creating depth and elevating the visual appeal of our images. And learning to observe light, rather than just see light, will place our photographs in a bracket above a large percentage of the masses. Rather than simply seeing, observing will open up so many more options for your photography and potentially change the way you view a composition. Observing is about taking what you see, and attributing significance to it through thought.

Every photographer can see the sunrise, but does every photographer observe it?

Golden hour is a commonly understood time of day. We know that during golden hour (which as an aside rarely lasts an hour!) the sun delivers us a warmer tone of light with elongated shadows. If we observe what happens to the light and the land during golden hour, we’ll notice how that affects several different aspects of our shot, and our camera.

Contrast drops throughout golden hour. The light tends to move across the land much quicker. Colours can change quite rapidly, greens for instance can move from almost yellow to deep dark green within a matter of minutes. Sun flares becomes a nuisance (or a key ingrediant depending on what you’re going for). Dynamic range drops. We get much cooler tones in our shadows whilst the sun is at it’s lowest ‘golden hour’ point than we will when it hangs slightly higher.

Tarn Hows - notice the much darker green tones in the background trees than the foreground due to the difference in light.

These are just a few observations we can make during the short period known as golden hour. And they would all have a potential impact on what you choose to photograph and how you choose to photograph it.

And these changes occur at all times of day and even night. Light is all around us, even when it may not appear to be the case. And it constantly affects the view of the world around us.

That’s why the truely great photographers stand apart. They observe light constantly, making it a lifetime goal, and they make critical compositional decisions based on those observations. It’s through a longer term approach to the observation of light, taking note of the nuances, the different qualities light has, that we can take leaps forward in our photography.

Light painting the land and the sky with colour

As outdoor photographers, we can’t always choose the light we shoot, but by observing rather than seeing, we’ll make decisions about subjects through our understanding of the light, rather than choosing a subject first and being disappointed by the light that is bouncing off it onto our canvas. As photographers, observing, rather than seeing, is the job spec and it’s a powerful skill to have.

Dave