Session 2: Light

The word photography means writing with light, and that is not a flourish — it is a description of what the camera records. The camera does not see a person or a plate of food; it sees the pattern of light bouncing off them. Two photographs of the same subject in different light are not the same photograph with different brightness, they are different images, and the difference is larger than any change of camera or lens could produce.

This is the most useful idea in the course, because it tells you where to spend attention. Most people photograph a subject and hope the light cooperates. The better habit is to look at the light first and then find where the subject works in it — moving a person two metres toward a window, or waiting ten minutes, or shooting the product on a different table.

And it is free. Light is the one variable in photography that costs nothing to improve, which matters in a context where gear is expensive and the sun arrives daily at roughly the same time whether you are ready or not.

Front light — the source behind you, hitting the subject's face — is what a phone flash and a built-in flash produce. It is easy and it is flat: because the light comes from near the lens, shadows fall directly behind the subject and are invisible, so no shape is revealed. Faces look smooth and dimensionless, which is sometimes wanted and usually dull.

Side light is where photographs come alive. Light from one side makes one half of the subject brighter than the other, and that difference is what the eye reads as shape and texture. It is why skin looks real, why food looks appetising, why fabric shows weave. Almost every flattering portrait and every good product photograph uses light from an angle rather than straight on.

Backlight — the source behind the subject — creates silhouettes, glowing edges around hair, and mood. It is also the reason so many holiday photographs are dark: the camera sees the bright background, exposes for it, and turns the subject into a shadow. Backlight is powerful when you choose it and ruinous when you do not notice it.

This is the distinction that most improves beginner work. Hard light comes from a small source and produces sharp-edged shadows with an abrupt jump from light to dark — the midday sun, a bare bulb, a phone flash. Soft light comes from a large source and produces gentle transitions — an overcast sky, a north-facing window, a white wall bounced into, a diffusing curtain.

The counter-intuitive part is that size is relative to the subject. The sun is enormous but very far away, so it behaves as a tiny point source and gives hard light. A cloudy sky is a soft source because the whole sky is glowing. Hold a white sheet between the sun and your subject and you have turned hard light into soft light by making the source bigger.

Soft light is forgiving, which is why it suits beginners and portraits: it wraps around a face, hides blemishes, and gives you a wide margin of error. Hard light is dramatic and unforgiving — it flatters texture and architecture and is brutal on skin at midday. Neither is better; knowing which one you have is the skill, because it determines whether to shoot or to modify.

A large window is the best free light source most people will ever own, and it is the standard setup for product and food photography. The method is short. Place the subject beside the window, not in front of it, roughly forty-five degrees to the glass so the light falls across it at an angle rather than flat. Turn off every other light in the room — this matters more than people expect, because a ceiling bulb adds a second light of a different colour and makes the whole image muddy.

Then fix the shadow side with a reflector: a piece of white foam board, a sheet of cardboard wrapped in kitchen foil, a white bedsheet hung behind, even a large white plate. Hold or prop it on the opposite side from the window and it bounces light back into the shadows. Moving it closer brightens the shadows; angling it away deepens them. You now have controllable two-light photography for the cost of a piece of board.

A curtain or a white bedsheet over the window works the other way: it diffuses, spreading the light and softening the shadows further. Between a reflector and a diffuser you can shape window light into almost anything, which is why professional food photographers work next to windows rather than under studio strobes.

Golden hour — the hour after sunrise and before sunset, in Lagos roughly 6:20 to 6:50 in the morning and 6:20 to 6:50 in the evening — is flattering for a specific reason, not a mystical one. The sun is low, so the light arrives at an angle and creates shape; it travels through more atmosphere, so it warms; and it is weaker, so it is gentler than midday sun. Shoot portraits then and almost everything improves without you doing anything.

Harmattan, from around December to February, changes the rules. The dust haze scatters light, which flattens contrast and drains colour, and it can turn the sun into a diffuse white disc. That soft light is genuinely good for portraits, but colours come out dull and slightly grey, so expect to add warmth and saturation when editing rather than fighting it in camera.

Then the hard case: mixed artificial light. A church service is the classic example — daylight through windows, warm tungsten bulbs, cool white LED panels, possibly a projector, all at once. No white balance setting can be correct for all of them, so pick a strategy: expose for the faces and accept the mixed colours, or move so one source dominates, or shoot in raw if your phone allows and fix the balance afterwards. The professional move is deciding which colour you are willing to live with before you shoot, rather than discovering you cannot fix it later.