Stop Avoiding Harsh Light: Five Rules That Actually Work
Five practical ways to work with hard sun, deep shadows and strong contrast instead of waiting for better light.
There is a piece of photography advice that has been repeated so often that it has almost become a rule: avoid the middle of the day. Shoot early in the morning, go out again in the late afternoon, wait for the golden hour and, if the sun is high and the shadows are hard, put the camera away and have lunch.
There is some sense behind this advice. Early and late light can be beautiful. It is softer, more directional and usually much easier to work with. But there is also one rather obvious problem: real life does not organise itself around golden hour.
If you are travelling, walking through a city, attending an event or simply happen to see something interesting at two o’clock in the afternoon, the light you have is the light you have. Sometimes that means bright sun, white pavement, deep shadows, reflections everywhere and a range between light and dark that seems designed specifically to annoy your camera.
I see this very often during workshops. As soon as the light becomes difficult, photographers start trying to correct it. They look for open shade, change settings, worry about the histogram or start thinking about what they will recover later in Lightroom. There is nothing necessarily wrong with any of that, but I prefer to begin somewhere else. I ask myself what this particular light is giving me that softer light would not.
Strong sunlight creates deep shadows, hard edges, silhouettes, graphic shapes and separation. An ordinary doorway can become a black rectangle. A shaft of sunlight across a pavement can become a stage. Someone walking from shadow into that light may suddenly become the only important element in the entire frame.
This is particularly interesting in black and white. Once colour disappears, the relationship between light and darkness becomes much more important. A scene that looks unpleasantly contrasty to the eye can become remarkably simple when reduced to tones, shapes and shadows.
The important thing is to stop asking harsh light to behave like soft light.
1. Protect the highlights
If there is one technical rule I want you to remember when photographing in strong sunlight, it is to watch the highlights. A shadow can contain very little information and still work beautifully. It can even become completely black and form an important part of the composition. A badly blown highlight is different. Once an important highlight has lost all detail, there may be very little left to recover.
For that reason, in strong light I generally expose for the brighter areas of the scene and allow the shadows to go where they want to go. This can feel wrong at first because the camera may show you an image that looks too dark. Large parts of the frame may contain very little detail and the histogram may sit rather heavily towards the left.
That does not automatically mean the exposure is wrong.
What matters is where you need the detail. If the important part of the photograph is correctly exposed, I am perfectly happy for other areas to become very dark. In many photographs I actually want them to. A photograph does not have to describe everything in front of the camera equally.
And this brings us to the more interesting part of photographing in strong light.
Before we continue
Protecting the highlights is the technical foundation, but the next four rules are much more about seeing than exposure. We will look at using shadows as part of the composition, simplifying a chaotic scene, changing the light simply by changing where you stand, and knowing when contrast is something to preserve rather than correct.
The aim is not to make midday sunlight look like golden hour. It is to recognise the photographs that harsh light makes possible and learn how to use it deliberately.
The rest of this lesson is for paid subscribers.
