Photography Tips | Learn To See The Light Like a Pro
© 2013 Wazari Wazir | Cameron Highlands Tea Plantation | All Photographs Taken With 24mm Prime Lens on Canon 5d Mark II
The photographs above were taken at Cameron Valley or Bharat Tea Plantation, it is located at the main road going up to Tanah Rata from Ringlet. This is among the most visited tea plantation at Cameron Highlands due to its location, easy access from the main road compared to Habu Boh Tea Plantation and Sungai Palas Boh Tea Plantation, where you need to travel a bit deeper from the main road to get access into it.
This is the favourite stop for picture taking, camera toting tourist to get themselves photographed against a beautiful rolling hill of tea plantation. Most of this tourist are not a photographer or simply said have little knowledge about photography even though they carry a DSLR (most of them carry a compact camera). Their concern is just to get a tea plantation behind them and most of them will take a “frontal photograph” where, their friends or family members will take a picture of them from the front and the tea plantation behind them.
The problem is that, during my visit here, the lighting from behind is too strong and without a powerful flash, most of the picture taken from the front will get the subject to look too dark in the photograph. Things will get worse if you took the photograph using a handphone, even though you can switch on your camera handphone flash, it is still too weak to compensate for the backlighting. The end result will be either you main subject ( the person you photograph) will be properly exposed but the background (tea plantation) will be too bright, lack of details (you will never know that it was a tea plantation behind) or the background will be properly exposed but your subject will be too dark.
So the solution if you don’t have a good flash or don’t have flash at all but still wanted to get the tea plantation with your subject, then the simple solution is to photograph your subject, family member for an instance from a side angle, not from the front. In the photograph above, I took the pictures of my wife carrying Arianna and my son HaiQal from the side, where I position the tea plantation on the right side of my wife.
The point here is, to know where the light falls on your subject face. Get to know first where the light is coming from and then position your subject accordingly. Most professional photographers will see where the light coming from first before they took the photograph, unlike some tourist who have little knowledge about photography, their main concern is a to get beautiful landscape or landmark behind them, they rarely pay attention to where the light is coming from.
I think by now you should get the ideas, but then again this blog of mine is a photography blog and most of you guys and gals knows about this, but hopefully you can share this post with your friends and family members who have little knowledge about photography, lets shed some light on them regarding on how to see the light like a Pro.
