This series of photos illustrates how to capture the best light. These photos were taken at 4 p.m. on an overcast day. The first two were taken in my kitchen, which receives indirect light from two windows on either side of the room. Our house is long and narrow, and it is bordered on either side by our neighbors' houses, both of which are less than 8 feet away. As a consequence, only the very front and very back rooms of our house get direct light. Direct light, however, can sometimes be too harsh. Sometimes if the light is directly on your subject, its colors can be washed out, and the contours of the object are obscured because there are not enough shadows to show the shape of the object that you are shooting. For this reason, I have found that the indirect light coming in through my kitchen windows makes for a nice, flattering light in which to shoot objects.
If you look closely at the shot above and especially the next one, you'll see that neither shot is quite in focus. Because I was shooting at 4 in the afternoon in indirect light, even opening my aperture as wide as it would let me at that particular focal length, there was still not enough light to get a proper exposure without slowing down the shutter speed as well. The shutter speed on the photo above is 1/5; a fifth of a second. That's pretty slow. Had I put my camera on a tripod, though (I didn't have the camera on a tripod for any of these shots), then the shot would have been in focus. Because I was trying to take the shot at 1/5 without a tripod, the movement of the shutter plus the subtle movement I was making just by standing there and pushing the shutter button, the shot ended up blurry. I had my 18-200 VR (Vibration Reduction) lens on the camera, and even with the VR activated, that was still too slow of a shutter to get an in focus shot without a tripod. So rule of thumb here: use a tripod in this shooting situation.
I placed the wine bottle on my kitchen table for this first shot. Our kitchen table is in the center of the room, away from the window. I thought the resulting light in this shot was sort of flat. Can you see how the whole shot is sort of dull? None of the colors "pop" out of the shot, and there are not many interesting highlights or shadows to make the wine bottle look more interesting. In order to capture the wine bottle in more interesting light, I moved it to a small table close to the window.
In this second shot, you can see that I still had the same problems with focus due to the slow shutter speed, but the lighting is a little more interesting. There are shadows cast by the wine bottle, as there were in the first shot, but unlike the first shot, there are some highlights in this shot as well- the bright parts on the left hand side of the wine bottle. A photograph with good lighting should have both highlights and shadows, plus a little bit of midtones as well.Highlights: the brightest part of your shot; white tones
Shadows: the darkest parts of your shot; black tones
Midtones: everything in between
You have to be careful with the highlights, especially when shooting digitally. If the highlights get too bright in your shot, then they tend to get too "hot," in that they show up bright white and washed out with no detail captured.
The second shot posted here, despite having a little better lighting, is still not all that much different from the first. Sometimes the lighting in certain places just doesn't flatter your subject very well. I could have improved either of these shots with the addition of a tripod, or with flash or photo lights. All of those things require set up time, though, and for the sake of brevity, I decided to take the wine bottle to another, better lit location to get a good shot.
When the skies are overcast, they produce a nice, even type of lighting that is very flattering for portraits or still lives, so I decided to take the wine bottle outside to my back yard to shoot it under the overcast skies.Notice that with this shot, I was able to shoot it with about the same aperture (f5), but the shutter speed changed to 1/60. 1/60 is a much faster shutter speed than 1/4, so I was able to take the shot hand holding my camera without the results being blurry. The lighting outside on that particular day was pretty even, as you get with overcast skies. This particular lighting is not especially dramatic, but if drama is not really what you are going for, then this type of lighting will work just fine.
You can also see here that the background of the shot is blurred, but the wine bottle is not. I put the camera on the widest aperture that I could get, which was f5. If I had a lens which would allow me to open the aperture to f2.8 or wider, then the background would have been even more blurred. As it was, f5 blurred the background out enough to draw attention to the wine bottle and away from my messy, wintering over yard.
