Lighting is one of the most important aspects of wedding photography. You could have the most amazing emotional moment, but if it’s in bad light, then you’re not going to see it properly in the photos. Bad light can cause an image to be too grainy or create shadows that are too harsh.

As a California Sikh Wedding Photographer, we never want to dictate the timeline of the wedding day, but we’d love to share a few tips to help you plan for lighting at different times during your wedding day that will make your photos extra gorgeous.

Natural Light vs. Artificial Light

In our experience here at Saiaf Films, natural light tends to be the “easiest” light to work with. This is because you can actually see the impact the light has on a person with your eyes very easily, and what you are seeing ends up being reflected pretty accurately by the camera.

Artificial light is much more challenging. There are many things that make it tougher, but these three are the most prominent:

• Ambient lighting produces unwanted color casts, impacting a person’s skin tone pretty significantly.
• It can be difficult, at times, to judge how much light is actually being projected onto a person. Unlike sunlight, ambient light can be trickier to understand how much it’s really illuminating things in the environment.
• With flash, photographers can struggle to understand how exactly it is working and how to adjust their settings because we only see the result after a photo is taken.

However, the good news is that it’s still possible to take beautiful portraits both in natural and artificial light environments. The Best California Sikh Wedding Photography can even mix the two to get amazing results.

Harsh Light vs. Soft Light

Harsh light is bright and directional lighting that produces strong shadows and well defined lines. In natural lighting outdoors, it is the type of light you would most often experience during the middle of the day.

Soft light is more evenly distributed and diffused. This type of light is more readily available in the shade, on overcast and cloudy days, and regularly on a daily basis during the golden hour. And because of this, this is the lighting style that a California Most Affordable Sikh Wedding Videographer and photographer love to shoot in.

Shadows & Highlights

Even if this is your first day being exposed to photography concepts, you are already going to be well aware of what shadows and highlights are just from day-to-day living. The challenge becomes understanding how these things play a role in your portrait work.

Shadows are the dark areas of a scene that cannot be reached by the light. Highlights are the bright areas of the scene that are fully touched by the light.

In portrait photography, shadows and highlights play a really significant role. The direction of the light can give (or minimize) emphasis on certain parts of a person because of where highlights and shadows end up falling.

The bottom line is that the trick with lighting is to learn when to use different arrangements to the benefit of your subject.