Shadow Details

This photo of my niece Maya was shot in my sister's living room, which, believe it or not, had light walls. Because the room was so large and Maya was standing in a shaft of direct sunlight, not enough light bounced off the walls to lighten the rest of the room. The result: a dramatic portrait of a confident young woman.

There are photographers who are almost obsessed with shadow detail. They buy cameras based on the dynamic range they can deliver. They use tripods, low-flare lenses, and shoot at the lowest available ISO. They bracket like hell, just to make sure they've got at least one "perfect" exposure. Needless to say, they always shoot RAW files, then process them, often with HDR software, to wring out the very last iota of tonal range. Their results are--and I say this without an ounce of sarcasm--very often impressive. The trick, of course, is for the details in those shadows to be worth looking at.

Here's what the same photo looked like before I dropped the shadows a bit and cloned out my nephew (also a photographer) in the background.

Personally, I have a hell of time managing that feat. What I do instead is to let the shadows fall where they may. I might even darken them to the point where they're solid black. If the shadows are geometric this converts them to graphic compositional elements that serve as negative space that naturally attracts the eye to the the brighter, more colorful areas. That's the idea anyway. Go too far and you end up with a big black mess.

Sometimes deep shadows, bright highlights, and shadow detail can co-exist happily.

If you'd like to try this for yourself, here are two tips: First, keep in mind that the eye naturally moves to the brighter areas of the image first. Try to develop a sense for whether the detail in the shadows adds or distracts from the highlight detail. If the latter, try adjusting the contrast curve or shadow/black sliders to darken the shadows just enough that they visually recede and the highlights begin to "pop."

The dark background looked almost as bright as this lighting fixture to my eye, but with judicious exposure and a bit of curve tweaking, the actual photo looks likes this.

The second tip is to remember that high-contrast lighting can be your friend. Pretend you're an old-school film photographer shooting color transparency film: Expose for the highlights and let the shadows fall whether they may. Then think of the shadows as solid shapes. If the shapes look interesting to you, there's a good chance they will look interesting to someone else.

Comments

[Andrew Kirk]

One of your most valuable posts. Thanks, Gordo.

[Frank]

Nice photos as always. Thank you for the reminder to watch the shadows and darken when needed.

[Monica Justesen Photography]

Thanks for this!

[Gianni Galassi]

I definitely agree with you, Gordon.
The way I try to compose my photographs is always based on seeing shadows as if they were solid shapes.
Shadow detail can give interesting or even surprising results under a technical point of view sometimes, but a correct exposure does not depend mainly on that.
IMHO there is a technical issue camera manufacturers are overlooking though: highlight detail. Inaccurate histograms and overboosted fake-dynamic-range in most recent cameras make the expose-to-the-right rule extremely dangerous when shooting high-contrast scenes, which too often end up giving clipped highlits.
Why don't they provide, in their often crappily long menu lists, an option allowing a real highlight-clipping-safe exposure in P, M and S modes? This would be a resourceful relieve, allowing the photographer to concentrate on framing and composing instead of manually helping the so-called semi-automatic exposure system.
And would create those creamy deep dark shadows that mark the difference between a photocopy and an image.

[Marivic]

I agree that this is a valuable post for the practicing photographer. I find myself facing these choices about letting the shadows fall or not, and I believe I follow your same approach. Play with the sliders and see where highlights distract or not, and find the balance you want. My film experience has me looking for those details in the shadows, but if they aren't worth seeing, it's okay. However, I don't want a big black muddy void, either. It all just depends on the image.