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Photographing Fall Foliage Capture the majesty of fall's colors with your digital camera. From "The Whole Picture" episode DTWP-204

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Working With Natural Lighting: Hard and Soft Light

Strong, direct sunlight is "hard" light because it produces dark, well defined shadows, bright highlights and clearly defined forms. Hard light tends to make strong colors more brilliant but washes out pale colors.

Sunlight can be diffused by smog and mist. Diffused light is softer. It produces weak, soft shadows and few highlights. Diffused light is often called "flat" because it illuminates some details but flattens the form. Weak, low angle sunlight brings out vibrant well-saturated colors.

Hard light

Soft light

Weak, low-angle light

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Dramatic contrast

High Contrast and Adjusting Exposure

If you want to take a picture where there's extreme contrast between your foreground subject and the skylight behind, you run the risk of an exposure that's too dark--especially if your camera is in an automatic setting.

You can take control of your exposure by doing the following:

• Shut off your auto flash, then focus on your subject.

• Next, zoom-in on your subject to eliminate the sky from the frame altogether.

• Set the exposure with no sky or competing background lighting.

• Then, widen the frame a little to bring in a touch of sky for contrast and drama.

Use sunlight to highlight textures.

Now that you know how to set the exposure, you can use light to increase texture. If you want to focus on the texture of your subject, make sure it is lit from the side. Find the direction of the sun and move yourself or reposition your subject so that sun light hits it sideways.

If deeply saturated color is what you want to focus on, let the sun assist you by using front lighting. Colors will look richer if photographed with late afternoon or early morning light coming from a low angle in the sky. Position yourself with your back to the sun and let this low light wash richly over your subject.

Deeply saturated color

Here's another quick tip: If your camera accepts filters, polarizing filters create drama by darkening the sky, increasing contrast and deepening colors. To use this type of filter position yourself at a 90 degree angle to the sun, then rotate the filter to reduce glare and intensify colors. If your camera doesn't accept filters, try putting using your polarized sunglasses in front of the lens.

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