10 Top Tips On How To Get Great Photos in Low Light and Bad Light

Its possible to get vibrant outdoor photos even in bad light of the dullest days. Here's a few simple tips to get great photos in bad light.

Turning poor light to your advantage can be more straightforward than you assume with these simple techniques. If you follow these tried and tested tips, you'll be surprised at what you'll be able to achieve in what would be an otherwise frustrating lighting situation.

I'll be the first to admit that bad light isn't generally the best way to go if you want to take colourful wildlife pictures. However, we can't always afford to wait for picture-perfect conditions. You must learn to work with and make the best of what's there.

What is Bad Light?

Bad light is considered any condition that makes it harder to achieve technically well-executed, aesthetically interesting photos. At this time of the year, it's usually dull, low light in the winter months. This kind of bad light makes it difficult to get shutter speeds fast enough for wildlife and makes images look flat and lifeless. Another form of bad light occurs when a weak sun abruptly breaks through the pervading murk. This can often confuse camera meters and ruin good compositions. Dull and murky days with light cloud cover can be a nuisance, too. The sky most often becomes pale and uninteresting and intrudes on pictures. This creates exposure problems if wildlife subjects are much darker.

After that, dark, cloudy days, with or without drizzle, require you to photograph at an unacceptably high ISO setting. High ISO makes it difficult to produce pin-sharp pictures with the requisite depth of field. Mist and fog may appear more promising, but as with most low-light conditions, if you're not careful, the finished results can end up muddy rather than moody, with little tonal variety to provide that all-important visual lift.

How To Get Great Photos in Bad Light

The key trick to photographing in a bad light is to adopt a glass-half-full mindset. Look for the positives in any given bad lighting situation, and let these be your guide on what to photograph and how to do it.

One big benefit is that you are free to shoot from any angle when it's dull since you don't have to consider the direction of the light. You can photograph all day when, typically, midday would be a no-no. Wildlife is also more lively on overcast days, so there's a higher probability of shooting fascinating behaviour.

Change Your Approach in Low Light

Be versatile and let bad light conditions dictate what you do. Analyse the pros and cons of the light's impact on shutter speeds, depth of field decisions and the tonal range in your finished pictures before deciding on a subject. If something appears too dark through your viewfinders, it most likely is. Hunt around for a different subject in brighter surroundings.

Green vegetation can register extremely well in overcast conditions. You wouldn't set out to photograph a winter goose in flight when the sky's pale grey and there's not enough light to freeze the wingbeats. Ask yourself instead, "What would work well in these conditions?" A frame-filling close-up of the resting goose's plumage might be one solution. The flat, shadow-free lighting is perfect for rendering fine feather detail brilliantly, and the tight crop will prevent a boring sky.

Low Light Subject and Composition Rules

In perfect conditions, good light does all the hard work for you. Good lighting can be the whole point of a picture. Find a nice subject, and you're there. In bad light, you need to put much more effort into creating a picture of what's to be had around you. Subject selection and composition considerations are essential. The right subject, framed in the right way, can help negate many of the problems of bad lighting.

Design Your Image with Bad Light in Mind

Think carefully about the design of your picture in poor light. Remember that content and composition trump poor light if you get this right. Give backgrounds as much weight in your overall thinking as the subjects themselves. In many cases, they're what makes the image work. Keep compositions simple and uncluttered when shooting in bad light, as these are the most direct in terms of eye appeal and the most forgiving if you haven't got the light on your side. Clean lines, graphic simplicity, and photographs emphasising shape and pattern will work best. Overcast conditions will offer softer, flatter lighting. Frame tightly and crop closely so your pictures' emphasis on form and content is clear.

Photographing in the Rain

There are several critical problems with rain, especially heavy rain. Firstly, it gets on your lens, and water drops create large distortions and dark spots in photos. Secondly, rain greatly reduces visibility. Large mountain vistas are out; however, enter some woods, and you'll notice that the rain has a transformative effect.

Heavy rain helps create a sense of depth in a photo. Woodland environments are often busy and chaotic, and describing the distance between trees in the photograph is difficult. Rain can help differentiate between the layers in the woodland and create a sense of depth to the scene.

Low Light Photography Solutions

You'd be forgiven for thinking bad light days take away photographic opportunities. The truth is that they open more options for you. Overcast lighting will give you lots of potential to get creative in wildlife photography.

I discussed earlier that you should do away with the unattractive and dull skies from your pictures. Like all rules, there are exceptions. You can make dull skies a creative addition to pictures if you make the monotonous paleness an integral feature of your photograph. For this to work, you need pale-toned subjects like the tones in the sky. Remember that you'll need a high ISO to freeze the motion for flight shots in such conditions.

Slow Down Your Photography in Low Light

Low light conditions are also ideal for getting creative with animal action shots. Don't panic if you can't get fast enough speeds to freeze movement in a bad light. All you need to do is turn the poor light to your advantage. Using slow shutter speeds, you can achieve creative impressionistic photographs where motion blur conveys a real sense of a subject's speed. Experiment by dialling in a slow shutter speed of around 1/15 to 1/30 sec and panning or tracking a fast-moving animal or bird, firing the shutter as you go.

Another trick in low light conditions where you have a stationary or static subject close to water is to use very slow shutter speeds to blur the motion of the flowing water.

Make Use of Flash in Bad Light

Flash is typically a last resort as it's generally better at killing atmosphere than creating it. However, there are occasions when the use of fill-in flash may give an otherwise drab image that little lift. If your subject is in heavily dappled light, such as a bird perched in a tree, the flash will fill the deep shadows and allow the camera to meter an otherwise excessively contrasty scene. Even a built-in camera flash can give a helpful dab of light to add sparkle, colour and texture on a heavily overcast day, adding catchlights to the eyes of an animal in shade or sheen to the iridescent carapace of a beetle.

For many wildlife subjects, on-camera flash is too weak, and a more powerful flashgun is required. Modern flash units are sophisticated and produce acceptable results in automatic daylight balancing mode. Some flashguns overlight subjects, so chances are you'll need to dial in some minus flash compensation.

Shoot Whatever the Weather

There's no hiding that bad light often goes hand in hand with lousy weather like rain, snow, fog, and mist. Often, you must admit defeat and pack away your equipment. However, there are also plenty of bad weather days when it will pay dividends to stay out there. Make sure you explore every possible avenue.

Snow creates flat, shadow-free lighting, which flatters some subjects. What colours remain in the ensuring wonderland, like the bright flash of a robin's red breast, really pop in pictures. Play around with slow shutter speeds to record the snowflakes around them as exaggerated impressionistic stripes and photograph at faster speeds to capture them as soft flakes. You can also use this technique when photographing wildlife in the rain.

Misty weather is excellent for cranking up the mood in photos; however, it can be tricky to get right. The majority of the time, your resulting photos don't quite match how you experienced this ethereal weather condition. It can help to incrementally overexpose photographs taken in misty conditions, perhaps up to a stop, and then assess them at the editing stage. You must ensure you have a definite point of interest in a misty photograph.

Learn to love dramatic storm clouds. Don't discount slate grey skies, particularly if there is a chance of some sun poking through. They make great backgrounds for flight shots, and exposing a dark grey sky is often more practical than a pale one.

Quite frequently in the UK, overcast weather conditions are full-blown storms. Sometimes, grim weather like this offers us one of my favourite bad light scenarios - rolling thunderclouds. You need a lot of good fortune to capture the sudden burst of sun to light up your grey sky, and when it does, make the most of it. It results in the most dramatic backdrop.

Focusing Tips in Low Light

Most autofocus systems will struggle in low light, so manual focus is nearly always the best choice. Live view permits you to get better manual focus in low light scenes as you can get a larger image on the LCD and zoom in to check the focus outcome.

If it is really dark, such as astrophotography nightscapes, you can always shine a torch on your subject to illuminate it enough to focus.

You can also set the lens to infinity by lining up the focusing ring marker with the infinity symbol.

Post Processing Solutions

It's always best to keep post-processing to a minimum; however, with pictures shot in bad light, a bit of careful attention on the PC can work wonders.

Shooting in RAW means much of this can be carried out non-destructively in RAW conversion software such as Adobe Lightroom, but even if you shoot JPEGs, you can achieve a lot in Photoshop. Stay clear of the brightness and contrast sliders; instead, make tonal changes using histograms and curves. If you've not attempted these, they're very simple to learn, and what you see is what you get previews. They are combined with intuitive slider controls to make adjustments very simple. Going a step further and learning how to use Photoshop layers and masks to change selective areas will provide you with even greater control.

With all these adjustments, remember that the key rule is that less is more. Don't over-manipulate.