The Wild Photographer

Tricks for Tricky Lighting - How to Take Great Photos even in Bad Light

• Episode 61

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Harsh midday highlights, blinding backlight, gloomy overcast, barely-there dawn… and full-on darkness. In this episode of The Wild Photographer, Court breaks down five common lighting scenarios that routinely present challenges for even experienced shooters—and gives you practical, field-tested fixes for each. 

From when to lean into the shadows, to when to under-expose, to the advantages of black-and-white photography, you’ll get settings, positioning tips, and creative pivots you can use on your very next outing.

What you’ll learn

  • How to tame harsh midday light with even lighting, B&W conversions, fast shutters, and deep depth of field (hello, f/22 starbursts).
  • Smart ways to handle backlighting: underexpose to protect highlights, pivot your position to remove sky, or embrace high-key silhouettes.
  • Low-light playbook for golden hour: fast glass vs. slower zooms, workable shutter rules with IBIS, intentional motion blur, and when to “shoot dark.”
  • Why flat, cloudy light is secretly great—and how to add shape and depth with composition, shallow DOF, and selective post work.
  • A simple, repeatable night wildlife recipe (spot metering + auto ISO + shallow aperture + slight underexposure) that actually works.

Chapter markers

  • 00:00 – Welcome & Episode Setup: Five “tricky light” scenarios you’ll face in the field.
  • 02:05 – Sponsors & Resources: Art Storefronts overview + Lensrentals promo; YouTube & blog pointers.
  • 06:30 – Harsh Midday Light: Seek even light; when to go black & white; leverage F11–F22 and ultra-fast shutters; birds-in-flight at noon.
  • 14:55 – Backlighting: Why highlights are hard to recover; underexpose a touch, use spot metering, minimize sky by changing your angle/elevation; creative high-key looks.
  • 23:40 – Low Light / Golden Hour: Start at widest aperture; practical shutter targets with/without IBIS; widen out if needed; intentional motion blur & panning; purposefully underexpose for mood.
  • 34:10 – Flat, Cloudy Light: Even light advantages; watch for edge-of-cloud transitions; add depth via background distance and shallow DOF; post tweaks (contrast, clarity, dehaze).
  • 42:45 – Night Wildlife: The simple settings stack; why spot metering + underexposure isolates the subject and keeps the scene clean.
  • 49:30 – Wrap-Up & Next Steps: Recap, podcast reviews, where to find Court’s portfolio and videos.

Court's Websites

Sponsors and Promo Codes:


Court Whelan | The Wild Pho... (00:00)
Hey folks, welcome back to The Wild Photographer. I'm your host, Court Whelan and today we're talking about tricks for tricky lighting. And I have to admit, I didn't intend for this to be a little bit of a Halloween pun when I was

this episode. gosh, I am really proud of my subconscious right now for the good timing on all this. But nevertheless, truly my...

goal today is to highlight five times that I routinely see when I'm on photo assignments and out in nature photographing where the light can just be truly tricky. And these are some really good tips and tricks for how to abate those challenging lighting situations. There's some times that you have to just embrace it. There are things you can do with camera settings and even your own body positioning to deal with it.

And I'm going to do a deep dive into all of those today. We're talking about harsh light, like think mid day, might be on African safari or just mid day in your backyard backlighting when you're photographing wildlife or human subjects. And the light is very harsh behind the person general low light. While it's an incredible time to photograph, there are challenges and ways to deal with it. Best flat light. When you have just really, really cloudy days again, can be very, very good for photography.

But nevertheless, some challenges we're gonna talk about and ways to get around that and turn it into really tasty lemonade. And finally, night wildlife, when you're photographing wildlife at night. I actually have a whole episode on that, but we're gonna dive into really the summary takeaways of how to photograph wildlife at night. So without further ado, we're gonna go ahead and get into it today.

But before we begin, I wanted to give a shout out to the amazing sponsors that help make the wild photographer free and available and coming up with great content all the time. First up, it's art storefronts. Art storefronts is a really amazing photo display website for photographers trying to sell their artwork. In fact, it's actually for anybody trying to sell their artwork. So you and the audience may be a painter or a sculptor or anything, but I'd imagine most of you are photographers.

And it's a beautiful aesthetic and very well functioning way to display your art, curate your art, organize your art. And probably the most important thing for me, promote my artwork. I am not very good at finding the time to promote the photos that I create and want to sell online. And so not only do they house the website, program the website, get everything looking really, really great with mockups and different types of frames. And they link to photo printing websites, but

I think the real forte, the real shining part is the ability to promote it by linking your social media channel or channels by linking other media that you might have like blogs and various things. It goes well beyond social media, email campaigns, etc. So Art Storefront is an incredible resource that takes a lot of the stress and really just saves me oodles of time. I can't tell you how much time it has saved me from not having to program the website, not having to upload my own artwork and

Keyword it they do all that for you if you mention the wild photographer when you are? Inquiring or signing up for art storefronts you're gonna get a free website build which is almost a $2,000 value it's a really high-end product and getting that huge bonus that that free part of it is definitely gonna save you some good money and Hopefully you can put that money into some other great gear or to some of your own photo prints if you wish to print them off

to see and visualize your artwork to then prep and prepare for selling it to others. Next up we've got lensrentals.com, tried and true sponsor, They specialize of course in renting lenses or camera bodies, really any camera equipment along those lines. And if you use a promo code wildphoto15, please note that if you've been a long time listener, that promo code has changed.

wild photo 15 you're going to get 15 % off your entire order. And I really advocate for renting lenses is a great way to try gear that you may not be ready to buy or might be a little bit too expensive for you right now. Renting it for a week renting it for a couple weeks while you are on a photo expedition is a great way to get access to really high end gear and their whole mechanism for like delivery and fulfillment and you being able to ship it back to them.

Is just so slick. It's it's the whole thing is just a big easy button for renting lenses. So again, lens rentals.com views, the promo code wild photo 15 you get 15 % off. Who doesn't want that? And then last couple things, just a little bit of shameless plugs, but I think they are great resources for you as a listener, you as the the budding photographer or even the experience pro photographer. My YouTube channel you can just search @courtwhelan on YouTube. It's got a host of ancillary things that

sometimes compliment this podcast really well. It might be something I wanted to talk about more, something I wanted to visually show during the course of this podcast. It might be examples of how I edit photos. So if you check out my YouTube channel, be sure to subscribe. It helps me a lot. It helps keep all this stuff churning and burning and of course continuing to be free.

gives me little bit of scratch to reinvest in some of my editing platforms, even the way I record this podcast. So it's really great if you do subscribe to my YouTube channel. And finally, on court whelan.com, I have a photo blog that I post a couple of times a month of photo techniques and stories. A lot of these are summaries of the podcasts. So whether you are listening and wish to have some notes to go along with it or maybe just don't have the time to listen or just want to print off some notes from the podcast that will help you in the field.

If you sign up for my blog on courtwhelan.com that's just C-O-U-R-T, just like a tennis court, W-H-E-L-A-N.com, all one word. You can check out a lot of other resources that I have for photography. Okay, without further ado, let's dive into the meat potatoes of the talk today. We're talking about tricks for tricky lighting. So the first up is harsh light. And I'm trying to paint this picture for you. You know, think like noon when you're out photographing wildlife or nature or landscapes.

I was just in Africa and the light turns really quite harsh quite quickly by mid to late morning and if certainly midday you get this really intense top down light, especially if you don't have clouds in the sky and it can be challenging because you do want as a photographer, the best light is that low angle dawn and dusk. It's those early morning hours like the golden hour in the morning and golden hour in the evening. But if you think about it, the majority of our time went out photographing if we're on all day photo safaris.

Safaris really anywhere in the world. It doesn't have to be Africa. It could be polar bears in the Arctic It could be it could be brown bears in Alaska. It could be trekking with mountain gorillas in Africa There's all sorts of different things where this really comes into play But what you're looking for when you have this harsh top-down lighting where you're getting intense shadows and intense bright points It is not inherently great for photography It's really quite subpar the number one thing you want to look for is in that scene in that landscape

is some sort of even lighting. what I mean by even lighting is you're trying to avoid those harsh shadows and harsh bright points. What I'm looking for primarily is entire scenes, animals, wildlife, even people, that allows me to work in the shadows. Now,

The benefit is that in the shadows, they're not necessarily dark because you are photographing in midday, so there's a lot of ambient light, but you want to look for even lighting where you have relatively the same lighting across your frame from left to right, from top to bottom of your photo viewfinder, because that allows you to avoid those really, really harsh bright spots, those highlights. It also allows you to avoid those really dark shadows where you might lose color, you might lose texture. Of course you lose light.

So the number one thing is look in your scene. It might mean you have to move or hike or walk or drive somewhere a little bit different. But if you can find even lighting where the sun is of course lighting the ambient atmosphere, but it's not directly shining on your photographic subjects, That's really the number one way to abate harsh light, but we're not going to stop there. We've got lots of tips and tricks for each of these.

So the next thing is, okay, well, maybe you can't find even lighting. Maybe the scene is far too modeled with light and dark. Embrace it. Embrace the harsh high contrast scene. And one of my favorite ways to do so is to think in black and white photography. Black and white photography does wonders if you're faced with dark shadows and bright highlights. It simplifies the scene and it takes out all the colors and all the white balance issues that you might have. And it simplifies it where

really bright spots and really dark spots actually can be extremely aesthetic. Now, I'm not necessarily recommending that you turn your camera into black and white mode, but you could do that. The primary way that I think about it is I still take those photos. I look for the harshest contrast, the darkest darks and the brightest brights. I still do all my normal photo thinking when I walk up on the scene or drive up on the scene. I'm thinking about composition. I'm thinking about

You know, could I pivot to make a different background, et cetera, all these tips and tricks that I've been talking about for years. But in other words, I embrace the harsh contrast in black and white photography. Usually what I do in Photoshop or what I'm using is Adobe camera raw. As I will switch to black and white, and you're going to be amazed at how that harsh contrast that doesn't look so good in color photography looks really good with black and white photography, black and white photography also handles noise and grain a lot better. So if you want to.

boost those shadows and bring up a lot of light by by messing with your photo in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw, i.e. some sort of Photoshop type platform. It's going to inject some noise and grain, especially if you're a high ISOs or especially if you're doing a lot of editing. But there's something about the grit of black and white photography in general that it works really, really well if you do want to highly edit it. So highly recommend black and white photography considerations when you are dealing with that harsh midday light.

The next thing is maybe, you know, in addition or instead of these other things, you take advantage of it being so bright and you think about really big depths of field or you think about really fast shutter speeds. Because when you consider what you have at your disposal, you have an inordinate amount of light. Remember, our eyes are not so good at perceiving exactly how much light is in a bright midday scene versus an early morning scene or heck, even an indoor scene because our eyes are.

incredible organs that adjust to the light. know, obviously you've seen pupils dilate and go to pinpoints. Our eyes really adjust quite well. The camera is a digital instrument. It is just perceiving what's actually there as far as photons and lumens and whatnot. So what it allows you to do when you have this incredible amount of light, you'll just have to trust me. It's an immense amount of light at midday is you can get those really, really big F numbers, i.e. small apertures. You can get those really big depth of fields.

So maybe think about what does shooting at F11, F16, F22 give to me? Well, one of them is it gives you a really easy way to get starburst effects. One of the more fun ways to photograph the sun is to have it about halfway hidden behind an object. Go to F22, take that shot and you're going to get those sun rays peeking around that vehicle or that tree or that rock or that mountain in a really glorious way. You can't always shoot at F22 and do well.

But when you have that bright midday light and a heck of a lot of photons, like I was just talking about, you can have those incredibly big depth of fields, i.e. big F numbers, and just think about how you might be able to use that. The other thing is with that inordinate amount of light, you can shoot ridiculously fast shutter speeds, meaning like one over 3,200, one over 5,000.

And this can be really good for moving subjects. It can be really good for photographing water and streams because you get every little droplet and splash in insanely crisp focus. You can combine those really fast shutter speeds with really big depths of field because remember you have so much light. Your camera can handle an F 11 and F 16 and sometimes one over 1600th of a second shutter speed. And you can get these really interesting scenes where streams and water are all in focus. You can get mountain scenes where everything is in

really, really good depth of field where the flower in the foreground is in focus, the midgrounds in focus, the deep in the background part is in focus too. So think about, what I have to deal with this light, otherwise I'm not photographing, I'm just sitting around waiting for that golden hour. What are these camera settings that I might be able to use now that I can't normally use? Well, it's those big F numbers and it's a really fast shutter speeds. And like I was mentioning, fast shutter speed is really good for wildlife and animals too.

One of my favorite times to photograph birds in flight is actually at midday because you have so much light you can easily shoot at F8 to get the whole bird in focus. You can easily shoot at 1 4,000th of a second and actually get the bird in really, really sharp focus. Even if it's launching off of a tree, even if it's screaming across the sky. So I have a whole episode on birds and flight photography, which I certainly encourage you to check out. That's a really fun thing to do. And it's a great superpower. We have when the light.

is top down, when the light is harsh, when you have a really, really bright scene. Okay, so the next one we're gonna talk about is backlighting. So backlighting can often be the bane of our existence. It is one of these times where it's hard to have your cake and eat it too. Backlighting, in essence, is when your animal, your wildlife subject, is in the shadows. It might be in the canopy of your tree, it might be on the ground, but it's completely shaded. But then the background, what is behind the animal, is completely blown out, it's completely bright.

Usually this happens when the animal is indeed in a tree or on a rock ledge and the big white skies behind it It could even be a bluebird day like really nice rich blue sky But if that animal is in the shade deep dark shade and you have that really bright sky in the background It's gonna look white and it's gonna be what we call completely blown out in the highlights and remember one of the hardest things to recover in Photoshop again, I say Photoshop, but it's Lightroom. It's Adobe camera raw. It's all these editing programs

One of the hardest things to recover, meaning to fix in post-processing are highlights. It's the stuff that's blown out. You actually get way more data in deep dark shadows than you do in really blown out highlights. So the first thing is when you are thinking about photographing backlit animals and you just can't do anything about it, it's like you either get that shot of the lemur in the tree with the white sky in the background or you don't is to underexpose a little bit. You want to...

not entirely exposed to the sky, because that sometimes can be a little bit too dark for the animal, but you want to get it where the shot coming out of your camera, whether it's in RAW, in JPEG, the animal is a little bit too dark, not completely silhouetted. You won't be able to recover that. But if you underexpose a little bit so the animal does need to be treated in Photoshop, you do need to mask it and select shadows or brightness or exposure and lighten it. You're going to be able to fix that scene way better.

than if you were to expose for the animal and blow the heck out of the highlights. It's really hard to recover that bright white sky and bring it down to some sort of normal non-luminescent type look. Now that all being said, one of my pivots, if you can't move around this, if you can't deal with it is embrace the highlights. You know, just like embracing the harsh light and embracing the high contrast. Sometimes we have no other option or sometimes our creative artistic vision

Is to just embrace it. I'm thinking about a scene I photographed just a couple of weeks ago in Kenya and had this beautiful ⁓ eagle that was sitting on a tree and it was this classic example. You know, sitting on a branch. It was relatively close to me, but it was nothing but sky in the background. It was a blue sky, but it looked white in my camera because it was just so dang bright compared to the shadowy eagle. As I said, you know what? I'm going to actually adjust my settings and expose for the eagle itself. So the Eagles in perfect exposure in the background is.

completely white, like really bright white. And what it did is it created this really artistic scene that almost looked like I had the eagle in front of a white background. It almost looked like if you remember those those older Apple commercials, maybe they're still doing them like this, but those old Apple commercials where a person, a subject was in front of just a stark white scene. It has a kind of cool artistic look. So embracing that really bright background and exposing for the wildlife is a trick.

You sometimes have to put your camera on spot metering and put that spot in middle of your scene right on the animal to get it right because we're talking about pretty drastic exposures in some cases. It could be like plus three stops depending on the light, but nevertheless it is one of the techniques. Now I probably should have started off with this, but the real number one technique to begin with when you talk about backlighting is how to minimize the sky. Let's be honest and this is a mechanical thing.

If you are photographing up a lemur in a tree, I'll use that example again, and the entire background of the lemur is the sky, you want to think, how can I make this scene where it's not the sky? And again, this is mechanical. This is you physically moving. The number one thing to do when you're shooting up again, it could be like a 30, 40, 50 degree angle into the tree, into the sky, just because of your positioning and the animal's positioning, is start looking around, looking around the hiking trail,

and see, you know, can I bring myself up physically a little bit? Is there a little hill? Even three, four, five feet could make a difference. But if you can really get up there and minimize that angle, so it goes down from 45 to 15 degrees, you might find that if you're shooting more on eye level with the animal, the background turns into another tree, a nice green verdant vegetation. You might be able to place.

something in the background that's the similar, the same lighting as the animal. And this, we kind of go back to that even lighting thing. We're not getting a lot of different values in terms of lights and darks. They're all relatively the same and your camera will magically adjust for that as you probably know. So minimizing the sky is really key. It's not necessarily always about getting higher. Sometimes you might be able to move left and right. Like there are a lot of times where I cannot find a hill. There is no relief. There's no, there's no.

thing I can scamper up to get at eye level. It's just the way it is. We're in a flat rainforest in Borneo. But what I'll do is I'll look to my left or the right, see how much leeway I have to pivot around the animal. And you'd be surprised when you walk up on a scene and see an orangutan in the tree and that white background is just killing your photo. You might find that if you move 10 feet to the left, all of sudden it's a nice green tree in the background and your background is no longer that bright white sky. Therefore,

your animal is no longer backlit. It's actually a really, really great thing. So pivoting, moving back and forward, trying to find some elevation to get on. These are ways you can truly minimize your sky in your scene.

okay, so now we're moving on to low light. And this is fun because low light is really great photography. When we're talking about the golden hour or even before that in the morning, sometimes people think of the golden hour as only being that evening time just before the sun sets, but you get a morning golden hour too. So either side of the day, either side of the spectrum, you get low light photography. And it's not just low light in the sense that the light amount is low, it's dimmer.

but it's also low angled light. really, when we're talking about wildlife photography or heck really anything out in nature, landscape photography, travel photography, cultural photography, pretty much any photograph you can photograph a doorknob in golden light and it looks really good. So this is a glorious time of day, but there are challenges with low light because again, what your eyes are seeing and adjusting to don't necessarily properly reflect exactly how much light

you've lost if you've turned from mid afternoon or high noon into that 5pm, 6pm time on again, say an African Safari or morning vice versa. So low angle while very, good. It provides that beautiful, soft golden light. You do often have less brightness, less light in the scene. And so there's some things you really, really have to consider. You're probably going to be shooting in shallower depths of field. So the first thing I always do if I'm walking out in the morning,

Oftentimes in pitch black on an African Safari Before we we get that early morning light and we do our drive out into the bush is I'm starting at the lowest F number I can possibly muster I have a 70-200 that allows me to go to f2.8, but my big telephoto zoom Bottoms out at like 4.5 at 100 and 7.1 at 500 that that is not a small F number F 7.1 is not small It's one of the reasons I have a little bit of qualms with that lens

So I might prioritize my 70 to 200 at f2.8 because I want to let as much light in as possible. Now by proxy, that also means we're shooting at very shallow depths of field. Remember if we're at a very low F number, i.e. a big aperture, it's going to have that shallow depth of field which gives a lot of background separation. I happen to like that, but you want to consider that in your photography. You are shooting at shallow depths of field in those low light times.

If you can't shoot at f2.8 or f4, I would consider both of those relatively big apertures or shallow depths of field,

to shoot at very slow shutters. Now, what is a slow shutter? This is very subjective if we're talking about freezing wildlife movement, but in general, in those early morning scenes, I'm realizing that the limiting factor is gonna be my own body movement, my hand movement. And so there's a rule that's gone back

ages in photography of the inverse focal length rule. so people generally say if you can shoot one over the focal length in terms of your shutter speed, you're able to freeze your own hand movement. So in other words, if I'm at a 200 millimeter,

I'm doing pretty well at freezing my own movement. Now, the thing is, is this

concept really came about before the image stabilization era. And so my personal rule of thumb is I'm aiming to shoot somewhere around half of that. So one over half of your focal length in terms of the calculation there. So use an example. If I'm at 200, I'm really trying to shoot at one over 100 to make absolutely sure that my own hand movement of just trying to hold steady, but not being able to be perfect is enough to freeze that.

I'm not thinking about wildlife movement. Wildlife movement is a whole different thing. I'm relying on the wildlife being still. If we have moving or running animals at that time of day, we're getting into a different thing and I'm talk about that next. But ultimately, yeah, I'm shooting at one over the focal length or one over half of the focal length. Now I've tried this and I've talked to a lot of buddies of mine that will slash that number.

⁓ You know with this new IBIS system that's in a lot of cameras, know internal what in body image stabilization is what IBIS stands for. They're talking to me about shooting on an image stabilized lens with an image stabilized body at 200 millimeters and they're shooting 1 30th of a second and getting great shots. So just know that that number is very subjective. ⁓ It depends largely on your own movement. If you're in a vehicle trying to photograph while you're coming to a stop

It's a very different thing than if you're on the ground being able to kind of tripod your elbows against your knees and holding perfectly still. So roughly, you you got those calculations there, but it's not the worst time to think about shooting even slower. And the final thing I'll mention is that the wider our angle is, like if we were to go from a 200 millimeter to a 70 millimeter, or even further to a 24 millimeter, the wider the angle is,

the more tolerance that lens is gonna have for very slow shutters. So for instance, I was taking a 20 millimeter, obviously very different looking photo, but I took a 20 millimeter to Africa and I was photographing it like one fifth of a second and the photos were turning out. You cannot do that with a telephoto because of the whole idea of that more acute angle, the more acute field of view. So just know if push comes to shove and you're really just not getting the shots.

zoom out, shoot wider, it's gonna be a different shot. I realize that the artistic impression or the artistic vision changes, but it is an easy hack to get a little bit slower shutter speed. It's gonna turn your wildlife shot into a wildlife in landscape shot or just a big wide angle landscape shot, but it is a way to deal with that if light is just too darn low.

Okay, the next thing still pertaining to low light, we're still talking about these golden hour times or pre golden hour is embracing motion blur. There's a few different terms out there like intentional motion blur or intentional camera blur, intentional camera

basically saying that you're shooting something that is moving deliberately very slow and injecting blur into your photo. So a classic example, I'll go back to wildlife.

is let's say I'm pre golden hour, I'm just at that dawn time where the sun hasn't risen yet and I see a hyena kind of skulking around the grasses or even let's even say a giraffe kind of trotting in the landscape of Africa. And I know I really need to shoot as slow as possible because my ISO is way too high or I just don't have the right lens on to get that shallow depth of field and that big aperture. What I might do is I might say, you know what?

This is the time to get some really interesting creative shots. I'm not going to get in their shot any other way. So I'm going to have my big telephoto on. I'm going to have my 400 millimeter, 500 millimeter telephoto zoom, and I'm going to shoot at one 20th of a second. And you're darn right. The photo is going to be blurry. But if you do it in the right way, you can actually get the movement of the legs. You can have the head sort of still, but get some movement in the scene. You can actually track the animal as you're shooting. So

the barrel of your lens is actually moving to follow the animal as you depress that shutter button and you get this kind of side swipe streaking movement along with the animal. Now there's a lot of technique and a lot of practice that comes into this technique. However, it's a really cool way when you have no other options dealing with super low light to do some really creative photography. And I got to say over the years while not a lot of them have turned out to make me love them.

The ones that have turned out are some of my tip top portfolio shots of all time. again, intentional motion blur or intentional camera blur is a really good technique. The range we're talking about is usually like one tenth to one fortieth of a second. That's kind of what we're dealing with.

The final thing on the low light section is shoot dark, underexpose your shot. As you manually underexpose, you're going to allow yourself that shutter speed to bump up a little bit. So if you're stuck at 1.15th of a second and you drop your exposure down two stops, all of a sudden you're shooting at 1.60th, which is pretty doable on some medium telephoto zooms, like a 70 to 200.

idea here,

is that you're kind of embracing the darkness. You're showcasing, hey, you know what? This is Dawn. I'm not trying to get a perfectly exposed shot. I'm not trying to make this look like it's midday. I'm trying to showcase a darkness, showcase the allure. So that's something I do often. Again, I do these things when I'm a little bit back in the corner. Of course, I'd love complete run of the show of whatever exposure I wanted, but when I'm back in a corner and I have to shoot slow,

I oftentimes think, how can I manually darken the shot to allow me to bump up that shutter? So I'm not dealing with intentional motion blur each and every time. So yeah, minus one, minus two, minus three stops. It's really subjective to the scene, to the light, to what you want to show. But sometimes I think we photographers are really stuck with this

that everything has to be perfectly exposed. It's got to be the zero exposure. But sometimes these really dark shots can be really cool.

Do I want to photograph all of my shots on a a glorious photo trip, underexposed? No, no. But if you have a couple of those in your final album, it's going to be really darn cool. And then again, just to throw this out, I already mentioned this with the harsh light, but black and white photography can be a really, really cool thing when you're forced to underexpose very strongly.

Okay. The next thing is another scenario where we photographers actually quite like it. ⁓ It's really cloudy days and very flat light.

Now the flat light is the part that can be troublesome, but cloudy days when you're dealing with wildlife photography and you're not photographing the landscape can actually be extraordinary because you do get those really even lighting scenarios. So flat light has some really great parts, but the problem is is sometimes you get very little separation, you get very little depth perception in those photos because it's not just the cloudy days, it's the fact that it's super cloudy.

and you're not getting really any angled light. Like the sun isn't shining through the clouds. It's just that dark and dim that everything does appear relatively flat in your camera.

Okay, so again, what do we do here? Well, the number one thing is, you know, just stay the course, take the shots as you normally would. Don't plan on doing a whole lot of different in camera, but plan on adding contrast, plan on darkening the darks and brightening the bright spots in post-processing. You're kind of relying on editing. Now, I probably shouldn't have started off with that one because, you know, in theory, you never want to rely on editing. But let's be honest, sometimes we have to.

The other thing you want to do or think about is be very, very cognizant of changes in light. the world doesn't stay cloudy every day. There are changes in light. Sometimes we're unlucky and that change happens overnight and the next day is glorious and that's fine. But we miss that transition. A brilliant time to get great photos is when that transition happens, when you're either going from really, really flat light to the sun just just peeking behind the clouds.

or vice versa, very bright scene and clouds coming in and losing that light. because what it acts like is a huge soft box, like a flash soft box in the sky where you get this really nice, diffuse lighting where you get a little bit of angled light, but for the most part, you have even lighting on your subject. You don't have those really bright light and dark points. It's very subtle.

It's a very soft gradient of light. And honestly, that can be some of the very best photography out there. So for flat light, you do want to think about what you can do in post-processing, adding some clarity, some contrast, darkening the darks, lightening the lights. There's some really cool meta sliders like the dehaze feature that I think is one of the easiest ways to make anything look more dramatic because that's really what we're talking about here is in flat lighting scenarios, they just don't look

quite as dramatic as you might be seeing them with your eye, with your naked eye. And so we have to inject that after the fact.

So again, watching for minute changes in light. If the sun is just peeking in, just peeking out, it can be probably one of the better photo moments of the day. So don't dismay if you do have flat light, the sun is just around the corner, hopefully just around the corner, just behind the clouds. And if you can kind of forecast where those clouds are going, you can get some really, really great shots. And then the final thing with flat light is, you know, the essence of flat light is it just lacks depth. It looks like everything's very two-dimensional out there.

And so really one of the better things to do is create your own depth with very shallow depths of field. And what I mean by shallow depths of field is again, those small F numbers, or it could be the way you photograph your photographic style, the scenes you're looking for, the images you're looking to create.

Depth field can happen in a number of different ways. The most obvious is to dial down a smaller F number, AKA bigger aperture. So getting down to F4, getting down to 2.8 if you have one of those great lenses, but it's not the only way. In fact, one of the better ways to create that separation is to think about this ratio between you, the wildlife, and the background. If you are much closer to the wildlife than the wildlife is to its background, it's gonna be a really nice separation. It's gonna be really nice depth of field.

That background is going to have that beautiful bouquet

However, if the ratio of you to the wildlife is quite distant and the wildlife's quite close to the background, you're almost never gonna get that background separation, even if you have the biggest fanciest lenses like big telephotos at f2.8. So with the flat light scenario, you might wanna kind of rejigger your thoughts a little bit and think, how can I prioritize the wildlife shots or the people shots or whatever kind of shots they might be such that I'm photographing

closer to the wildlife with wildlife that has much more distant background. And this is not me saying, this is the time to get close to wildlife. Of course we all would. So it's not always that it's more just, you know, if I'm faced with options, A, B and C of animals, and they're all at the same distance from me, you know, I can't necessarily get closer without spooking them or doing something unethical. But are one of those three opportunities such that there's a much deeper background, much more distant background, maybe this one on the left.

has a background of a rock wall. This one in the middle doesn't even really have a background. It's just big planes or fields. However, the one on the right has a beautiful mountain in the background or something that's much more distant. Again, it's that ratio and that works with really any apertures.

it's just switching gears a little bit and looking for the photo opportunities in a slightly different way.

Okay, the fifth and final scenario we're talking about here is nighttime wildlife photography. And this is tough. I've done a whole episode on this. So if you want the nitty gritty, you can definitely dive into that after this episode. But I'm going to give you the summary here. And it actually is. It's kind of basic. It's very tough, but it is a basic set of circumstances to get a good exposure on the animal when we're photographing, frankly, in like pitch black conditions. Now, this is not for every photographer. This is not for every scenario or every photo trip.

I'm thinking of the trips where we are doing night wildlife drives, where we are walking around night. It might be looking for chameleons in Madagascar. It might be looking for Western Tarsiers in Borneo. It might be doing nighttime safari drives in Africa where the light is truly lost and we are now in darkness. What do you do? How do you photograph night wildlife? Well, the basic gist is you want to start thinking about your settings pretty intensely.

And you want to begin with the lowest F number possible. That might be a little bit obvious, but you want to shoot with the lowest F number. If you can get to 2.8, that's great. F4, that's fine. F5.6, that's just, that's what you got. So the lowest F number possible, you're going to want to shoot at again, roughly one over half the focal length. So if you're shooting at a 100 millimeter, about one over 50 will do it. 200 millimeter, one over 100, 300 millimeter, one over 150, roughly, because you're trying to eke out as much light as possible.

Now here's the trick, you're put your camera on spot metering. Okay, so this is in your metering settings and spot metering means that the very middle of your frame, there's gonna be a little box or a circle, that is the only part that your camera's gonna actually meter on. Okay, and when I say meter, it means choose the exposure. And then you're gonna choose auto ISO, and then you're gonna underexpose by roughly one full stop. Okay, now the reason for all this,

Again, you can just take those settings and dial them in and not think about it. But the reason behind it all is that very likely when you're seeing wildlife at night, your guide, your expedition leader, your fellow photographers, someone's going to have a nice, soft, somewhat dim flashlight on the animal.

And what's going to happen is that light is going to fall off dramatically

which is why oftentimes when you see night wildlife photos, everything is pitch black around the animal, the foreground, the background, the left to the right, but the animal can be quite nicely exposed. And that's what we're going for here. So we're not worrying about the environment. We're not trying to illuminate the trees or anything like that. In fact, it's quite distracting if you do so. So the best thing really is to just expose for the wildlife. And that's what that spot metering does. And then again, you want the shallowest depth of field to let in the most amount of light.

You need to have the right shutter speed to not have any hand movement injected in the equation. And then auto ISO I find is pretty great just because it's one thing you don't have to think about. But if you did want to set it, you're probably in the range of 800 to 3200. Surprisingly, 800 works out quite well because again, we're only illuminating that thing that the flashlight's actually hitting. So that's the real secret sauce here. And then the final thing that under exposure, the reason behind that.

is we actually are trying to manually darken the rest of the surroundings. The flashlight sometimes can be quite harsh. ⁓ Sometimes we might find birds that are on branches at night and the iridescence shining from the bird's feathers back at us is a little bit harsh. So just dialing down your scene a little bit, darkening it and then knowing that in post-processing, if you need to boost it up a little bit, you certainly can. But you can tell...

It's a very, very specific recipe, but I promise you it is the recipe for success for night photography. But with that, I just want to thank you for listening. We talked about five different scenarios of how to deal with tricky lighting.

in this trick or treat kind of week. Five tricks for tricky lighting folks. Thanks so much. Again, I would be honored if you would subscribe to this podcast and listen to future episodes, back episodes. This is episode 61, believe it or not.

And on a separate topic, you know, if you are looking to elevate your photography more and more, which I'm sure the vast majority of you are doing, that's why you're listening to this.

I found early on in my career is looking at other.

Pro photographers is one of the best ways for me to figure out my own style, my own techniques, the direction I wanted to go. You can certainly do so at court_whelan on Instagram. Also my website courtwhelan.com is a great way to see a lot of other example portfolio type shots like tip top. My favorite, my best of my best. That's just courtwhelan.com And then if you want additional information,

you can do so on YouTube at court whelan all one word so folks once again Thanks so much for joining and happy Halloween


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Court Whelan

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