Street Photography at Midday
I have a problem. I shoot a lot at midday. A lot of photographers shy away from midday sun or harsh light and there’s good reason for that. Golden hour, where the light is warm and the soft quality of it and flattering tones makes even the ugliest person look passable. Hard light though is difficult to expose for. Hard light leaves a trail of blown highlights and shadows devoid of detail. Hard light only hurts.
Well it can do but it can also be great! Look at a master like Trent Parke to see what he can do with the harsh light of an Australian sun. The reason I shoot a lot in the middle of the day is often my schedule lends itself to this time. If I am off work and on a weekend I can have breakfast and my coffee at home and head into town mid morning a couple of hours before meeting a friend or whatever it is I’m doing that day. I find myself shooting in hard light again. And I have grown to love it. I go back and forth in my photography over high contrast vs low contrast images. I shoot a lot at night which is always high contrast, in overcast weather as I live in Manchester (meaning low contrast) and then when the sun comes out I am in hard light yet again and circumstances can often dictate more high contrast images.
I think the human eye compared to a camera sees so much more dynamic range so I do like to try and take some of the contrast out of my photos to try and reflect a sense of reality and also let the shadows reveal their secrets. Push an image too much in Lightroom though and the photo can look muddy. That’s why a lot of times I have to embrace the contrast of the scene and accept my camera has a limited dynamic range and work around it. I would always rather let the shadows fall black than blow out highlights. I find often that when the light is bright and a photo is taken in shadow it looks terrible. Often if I am walking around I don’t even look into the shadows, I accept that they’re “no photo” areas and what else are we photographers doing but chasing the light? Why waste it?
To this end I have been inspired by the technique of chiaroscuro and the Italian painter Caravaggio. His painting of strong light and deep shadows light a flame in me and if I can just instil a fraction of that in my photos I would be happy. Even if most of the time it is the technique only that is there and not the substance. Not many of us are renaissance grade painters or photographers but we can still take inspiration. I use to spot meter for the highlights and found that was a good way but now I just meter normally (evaluative or average, matrix etc) and knock the exposure compensation down a stop or two to taste. I still want to have some options in post so I don’t overdo it but I like my out of camera image to be halfway there, to be intentional and not leave it all to post processing. To take the edge off the blandness of the light the white balance can be used judiciously to warm up the photo, again I am not aiming for a golden hour image. The strong shadows would never permit that anyway. But it makes the image a lot more pleasing to look at.
Here are some of my favourite images shot in hard light.
