Learning to Balance the Light in Photography

IT is so fun to be constantly learning new things in photography. I had the great opportunity to work with the amazing photographer Caryn Esplin a month or so ago. One of the main principles she teaches people is to balance the light. In fact she wrote a book about it which you can check out here. I have learned that if you can learn to balance the light, you can learn to take extraordinary images. I had the opportunity to take some photos where I practiced balancing the light in my photography and the end results were so fun.

If you want to learn more about balancing light in your photography, I would, again,  highly recommend Caryn Esplin’s book as well as this video on balancing light with a model.

Now for the images I was able to caption when I balanced the light.

Water Drop

To get this shot, I had my camera set up on a tripod with a glass pan of water in front of me fill with water. I had a paper taped up behind the pan with the fun colors you see in the image so that it would reflect in the water. I also had a plastic bag with a tiny hole cut in one of the corners rigged up so it would drip one drop every so often. Then with two speed lights set up, it was all a matter of lots of pictures and timing. I was able to capture several different “stages” of a water drop but this one was my favorite.

Good Ol’ DP

Dr.Pepper is my guilty pleasure, so of course I had to try and capture the beauty of the drink. This time I was playing around with water spray. I used continuous LED lights to achieve the lighting in this image. It took a while to balance the light just right along with the pouring and the mist but I was finally able to capture the image I wanted.

Romance at it’s Sweetest

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Is there anything that says romance more then a fireplace, sugar and a strawberry? I don’t think so. For this image I ahd to balance the light of the fireplace along with the light if a continues light wand. I really love how this image turned out.