The Single Most Important Photography Tip My Teacher Taught Me

If there is one thing that defines photography, it's light. As obvious as this may seem, lighting is the single most important aspect about any photo, and I must admit, even after years of experience I still find myself forgetting about this occasionally.

My teacher used to tell me "light makes or breaks the picture", and simply by understanding light one can take a big leap ahead in their photography.

The photograph above was taken with 18 second exposure time and extremely small aperture of f/27 . I fired my external flash 5 times from different angles during the exposure.

So, what kind of difference does doing this really make? Take a look at this:

This is the same scene taken in regular room lighting, the difference is like a night and day. And I'm not talking about the obviously different looking cloth beneath the apples - that is just some clever editing I had to resort to because I didn't have the right kind of cloth at hand - I'm talking about the apples. Can you see how much more 3-dimensional they appear?

So, here is an illustration how the lighting in this scene works:

1: I fired the flash first at the curtains behind the apples to give the background some light
2+3: I fired the flash on both sides, behind the apples, in an angle to make the "hair light" effect.
4: Then I fired the flash from the left side, a little bit farther away for more even light
5: And finally I filled the shadow that was forming in front of the apples.

I obviously did a lot of image manipulation trickery as well, but the basis for any good photograph is good lighting regardless. Even image manipulation cannot save a badly lit picture.

If you found this post useful or you like the photograph, please consider resteeming and upvoting! It would really help me out. :) If you want to see more pictures and tips from me in the future, then simply follow. Thanks for reading, have a great day and may the light shine upon you!