Photography | Shooting in Tricky Lighting Conditions

© 2011 Wazari Wazir | Le Tour de Langkawi | Kuala Lumpur City Centre | ISO 400 | 1/1600 | F4 | 10 – 20mm

As a photographer, sometimes we have to deal with a situation like this, a situation where the lighting condition can fools our camera. Most of the times if we use a Program Mode, your camera metering system will take and average reading of the situation and makes it own decision about the exposure. Your camera doesn’t know which is your main subject in the frame. All they care is to get the exposure right, “according to the camera metering system”. Believe me, if you are using a Program Mode here, the peloton there will be underexposed. I knew it in advance because the large area of picture or the scene above consist of bright area and your camera will try to get a “nice exposure” for that bright area and leaving the shade area there where the peloton will be passing by underexposed.

For this shot, I did use Nikon Matrix Metering or Multi-segment metering here in Manual Mode. I take the reading on the shade area where the peloton of Le Tour de Langkawi will be passing through. When I do that, I mean when I take the reading on the shade area there, the sky will be overexposed, I don’t mind about that because my subject here is not the sky but the peloton so I’ve to compromise here. The most important thing for me is to get the peloton well exposed, not too dark and not to bright, enough to see their face and their jersey.

I did not use flash here and if you ask me why I don’t use flash here? I would like to answer that with a question also, how often do you see sports photographer using flash in indoor stadium like Badminton or Gymnastic competition? They don’t use flash when the competition is going on, maybe they will use flash during prize giving ceremony but not during the match. The reason is we don’t want to distract their attention, the light from the flash will become a distraction to them to perform their dues, no matter how bad the lighting condition in the indoor stadium, sports photographer will never use flash, instead they will push their camera ISO Higher, sometimes in between  ISO 1000 to ISO 5000 depending on the sports event, I use ISO 5000 during Thomas Cup event in Kuala Lumpur last year.

Same goes for the picture above, I use ISO 400 because I need to use a very fast shutter speed in order to freeze the actions, they are very fast, using ISO 100 or lower will never let me use fast shutter speed, so I need to use faster shutter speed and in this case I use ISO 400 and I get a shutter speed of 1/1600 which is good enough to freeze the peloton. Judging from the picture above, it’s look like they are cycling in the park, the truth is they are very-very fast, in less than 30 sec, those peloton are nowhere to be seen, they are so damn fast. I’ve less than one minute to get everything right.

I don’t use flash here, simply because I don’t want to take a risk getting hit by the peloton, they are moving very fast,while I was lying on the ground with my 10-20mm lens, my distance and the peloton are not very far, in fact, less than a foot between me and the cyclist. I don’t want to take the risk to “surprise” them with the flash, it could be fatal if I use the flash, since this is super sharp corner just few feet behind my back is a sharp corner.

For this shot, I use continues shooting option, pressing the shutter all the way from the moment the first peloton enter the frame until the last peloton leaving the frame. like I said, they are very fast and I only have less than 30 sec to captured them passing by here, luckily they are passing by here for five times, so I can choose another angle if I want to for the next few rounds. Once again when we have to deal with tricky lighting conditions in photography and we don’t have much option to improvise the scenario, then we must prioritize, just focus on the subject that matters, get a decent exposure for them and don’t worry about other things that is not so important in the frame even though some part of the image will be burned out or underexposed. Sometimes we cannot have it all.