This is especially true for subjects with a high percentage of direct reflected light. Even if the light is set the same value as the main light. In reality you're actually seeing a different blend of diffuse and direct reflections.Īs you move accent lights farther behind a subject, they often look too bright. Some refer to lights working more efficiently with one persons hair than another. The blend of diffuse and direct reflections varies greatly in the hair from one person to the next. Think of all the discussions about the placement and brightness of hair lights and accent lights.
#Specular light photography how to
It’s this mixture that creates challenges for the photographer.įor years students have express frustration when instructors demonstrate how to accurately meter a subject and then, seemingly off the top of their heads, pull out some type of fudge factor. Most of the light reflecting off of normal subjects is a mixture of all three types of reflections. But in reality, we seldom photograph subjects that are 100% diffuse or direct reflective. Now, obtaining an exposure value for either of these is pretty straight forward. As it’s name implies, the reflection is diffused in all directions and the brightness is the same regardless of the angle from which they are viewed.
(We’ll leave the discussion on glare to another blog post.)Ī diffuse reflection is quite different. Glare is a direct reflection but the light is polarized. So, when I refer to a direct reflection, you can think specular - that’s ok. Specular highlights, or more correctly, specular reflections, are a direct reflection of the light source. The sun reflecting off the waves or the bright highlights in a car’s windshield or chrome. Most photographers have in their vocabulary the term “specular” to describe highlights from bright light sources. It is a mirror image of the light source that produces them. Reflected light can bounce off a subject in three different ways - you can have a diffuse reflection, direct reflection and glare.Ī direct reflection is like that off of a mirror. But reflections aren’t so straight forward. In any photograph, your sensor is recording light that has been reflected off of a subject.
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