photographers wield light like authors wield words to tell stories. different qualities of light evoke different emotions, and poor lighting can make even the most charming person in the world look like Quasimodo.

From a photography standpoint, you always want to be thinking about light. It’s comprised of three components — quality, color and direction.

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Here are five photography ideas to help you make the most of your light.

1. let there be light!

Your flash is a powerful tool that lets you manipulate light, and with it, you can guide a viewer’s eye, and make them notice what you want them to notice.

But flashes aren’t your only light sources. Windows, lamps, overhead lights, mirrors — heck, even flashlights and the light from the screen on your phone are light sources.

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Now, considering that you can’t always be in the room with someone when they’re checking out one of your pictures, that’s where your ability to manipulate light comes into play in your photography.

One crucial thing to remember? You don’t always have to point your flash directly at your subject. Light reflects and bounces off surfaces, and you can use that to your advantage. Experiment by taking pictures near windows, lamps, overhead lights, bright walls (keep in mind that walls will throw a colorcast), and combine light sources — literally step them around often — to create different effects.

2. What are soft boxes and umbrellas used for?

Soft boxes — those large, normally black or white rectangular boxes you see mounted on tall poles on film sets and photo shoots — are referred to as light modifiers. They’re typically used to diffuse powerful lights, minimizing harsh, unflattering shadows, like the kind that the flash on your cam can produce.

Without a light modifier, a flash is like a maker gun of light. Modifiers like umbrellas soften the light as it passes through them. HINT-HINT: bedsheets, curtains and other semi-transparent fabrics you already have around the house do the same thing.

3. Going the distance

Changing the distance between your light sources and your subject can create drastically different effects. Sometimes, taking one step left or right, or forward or back, can absolutely change your picture. This is particularly obvious in direct sunlight on a bright, sunny day. often all it takes is one or two steps to step your subject into the shadows, where your light is softer and probably much a lot more flattering.

4. We’re gellin’

Professional photographers typically place tinted plastic covers called gels (which actually aren’t gels at all) over their light sources to change the quality or color temperature of light, especially in mixed lighting situations.

All light has a color tint (think unflattering fluorescent restroom lighting). often it’s a lot more yellow/orange, and other times it’s a lot more blueish/green. photography gels, like amber CTO gels (Color temperature Orange), can right for an excess of blue in your light.

5. Lenses: now you see me, now you don’t

You know those huge, long cam lenses that paparazi photographers use to snap pictures of celebrities from a mile away? Those are high millimeter lenses like 300mm or 400mm and up, which work in multiples of 35mm, which approximates the distance the naked eye sees, so a 300mm lens is about 8.5x magnification (makes everything look closer).

Lenses are like photography’s secret sauce. There’s a lot to understanding how lenses work, but the lower the millimeter rating, the broader the field of view (the a lot more you can see). The higher the millimeter rating, the greater the magnification or zoom.

Another very crucial criteria of lenses is called aperture, and it’s complicated, but you can look at it like this: the lower the f rating of the lens, the faster it is (generally) and the better it is at taking clear pictures in low light.

Like I said, there’s a lot more to it than that, but that’s the gist of it. one of my very favorite Canon lenses is the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8. The 1.8 indicates that it’s quite quick (quick enough to snap action pics of Tabs) and pretty good in low light, even without a flash. and it’s not extremely expensive, as far as lenses go.

Most “kit” lenses that come with DSLR cameras are around f/3.5 and up. The Canon 50mm f/1.8 above is faster.

I hope these ideas help you take better pictures.

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ភី។ ស៊ី។ ស៊ី For a lot more ideas from Photoshop world and other conferences I’ve attended, click here.