How to Balance High Contrast Lighting Situations in Photography By Jen Golay

Written by Jen Golay

As we get closer to spring and summer, bright, sunny days will be calling to us to get outside with our cameras. Any photographer will tell you that it can be hard to capture what our eyes see when bright light creates dark shadows or dappled light under the big shade tree in your yard.

Or maybe you’re inside on a cold, snowy, bright, sunny day, and you’re trying to photograph your pet sitting in the sunshine, and you’re not sure how to meter so the details of your pet’s fur or eyes are properly exposed as well as the rest of the room.

What these two situations have in common is that they are scenes with high contrast.

Understanding Contrast in Photography

Contrast is the difference between the lightest tones in your scene or image and the darkest tones in your scene or image.

A high contrast scene or image will have very bright highlights as well as very dark shadows. A low contrast scene or image will have tones that are all similar and more in the middle of the contrast spectrum—shades of gray, if you will.

Contrast is the spectrum from white to black with every tone in between. (Tone is the lightness or darkness of a color.)

Is contrast in a scene you want to photograph good or bad? That is up to you the artist and your viewer. When faced with a high-contrast lighting situation, you have the choice to try to replicate that high contrast light on film, or to try to balance the contrast.

Today we’re going to talk about how to balance the contrast.

Using Bracketing to Understand Contrast

Perhaps you’re new to film photography, and you’re faced with a high-contrast scene, and you want to try to get some details in your highlights and your shadows. Or maybe you’re just not sure how to handle a high-contrast lighting situation.

One way to start learning what type of contrast you like or how to handle various contrast situations is to bracket the scene.

Bracketing is the process of taking multiple exposures of the same scene but changing the exposure value in each shot.

Some cameras have a built-in bracketing mode where you can push a button or change a mode in the menu and the camera will automatically take one image as you have dialed in the exposure, then follow it with two more images—one a stop brighter and one a stop darker.

You may want to take exposure notes when bracketing so that you know which exposure is which.

If your camera does not have a bracketing mode, you can do the exposure calculations and adjustments on your camera yourself.

Again, exposure notes will come in handy when you see your processed images to help you decide the look you prefer. There is no rule in bracketing that says you have to stop with just +1 or -1 stops. You can bracket up or down as many stops as you want or as your camera will let you.

The benefits of bracketing when you are trying to figure out how to handle a high contrast lighting situation is that it gives you options of the same scene, and allows you to decide how much contrast you like.

It also shows you how the same scene looks when you focus on details in the shadows or details in the highlights or trying to capture enough details at both ends of the spectrum.

Metering to Balance Contrast

If you’re confronted with a lighting situation that has a great deal of contrast, and you want to balance out that contrast, you can use your camera’s built-in light meter or a spot meter with averaging capabilities.

To even out the contrast, you’ll want to meter for the midtones.

To capture as much detail as possible at both ends of the contrast spectrum—or at least as much as your film will allow, you can use your camera’s matrix meter mode. Or you can use your spot meter with averaging capabilities (like the Sekonic L-508, which you can find on eBay) or a gray card.

You can learn more about the best handheld light meters for film photography here.

Many more recent film cameras have several metering modes: matrix or average, center-weighted, and spot. Your camera’s built-in reflective meter can still be fooled by high contrast scenes. Depening on it’s quirks, it may see highlights better than shadows and try to bring down the exposure thus deepen the shadows. Or it may see the shadows as a higher priority and bring up the exposure completely over-exposing the highlights.

You can try to help your camera not be fooled by these situations by bracketing as we discussed earlier. Or you can use a spot meter and a gray card.

Using a Gray Card

Using a gray card in a high contrast scene can help you balance the contrast, but it may not be possible to use in every situation.

If you’re able to use a gray card, place it in the same light as your subject. Use your spot meter (either in your camera or a hand-held) and aim it at the gray card filling the spot meter’s viewfinder and take an exposure reading. A gray card metered with a spot meter will give you an exposure for the mid-tones.

You can also use an incident light meter placed in the same light as your subject for an exposure metered for the mid-tones. Scenes metered for the mid-tones will have some detail in the shadows and the highlights with less contrast than an image metered for the highlights.

You can also use a meter with averaging capabilities like the two-in-one Sekonic L-508 or Sekonic L-358 incident meter.

To average the highlights and shadows in your scene, you will need to use the averaging feature on your spot meter. Meter the bright part of the scene and then the dark part of the scene and let you meter average the two exposures for one that should be able to capture most of the detail in the highlights and the shadows.

Bonus tip: If you really want to capture as many tones as possible in a high contrast scene, master the zone system and learn to make your own prints in the darkroom. This is how Ansel Adams captured and created his amazing images that often had tones from 0 (black) to X (white) and all of the tones in between.

Using Fill Flash, a Reflector, or a ND filter

If you’re faced with a high contrast-scene, and you’re looking for a way to tone down the contrast or maintain the highlights while also bringing up the shadows, you can use fill flash or a reflector.

Or if faced with a high-contrast scene and you want to maintain the shadows and tone down the highlights, you can use a neutral density filter.

Using fill flash or a reflector will pop some light onto your subject to push away any shadows while allowing you to expose for the brighter part of your scene.

For example, in a portrait in the shade or at sunset, without the fill flash or the reflector, if you exposed for the sky or the brighter background, your subject would be in the shadows or silhouette.

Using a neutral density or graduated neutral density filter often comes in handy when shooting film. Older film cameras often max out their shutter speeds at 1/500th of a second, which may not be fast enough to not over-expose an image on a really sunny day.

Or you may not have fill flash or a reflector with you if you’re out hiking. They can be rather cumbersome and ungainly. If you bring a graduated neutral density filter with you, you can keep the details in the bright sky while exposing for the subject in front of you. I like to think of a neutral density filter as sunglasses for my camera.

Conclusion

Handling contrast lighting situations is an important tool to have in your photography skills toolbox. I hope that some of these tips will give you more confidence when faced with a high contrast scene to help you balance details in the highlights and shadows.

Next time, we will talk about adding or subtracting contrast in your images.

Thank you so much, Jen! Jen is a regular contributor here at Shoot It With Film, and you can check out her other articles here, including 3 Great Film Stocks for Winter and 5 Tips for Great Black and White Film Photography.

You can also check out more of Jen’s work on Instagram.

Leave your questions about balancing high contrast lighting situations in your photography below in the comments!

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Jen Golay

Jen Golay is a senior portrait and travel film photographer and a regular contributor for Shoot It With Film. Find her other articles here, such as How To Shoot Kodak Gold 200 and Olympus Pen F Half-Frame Film Camera Review.

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