But first, one last note on why equipment can make a difference, and that relates to how high you can set the ISO while still getting usable photos. If you're not familiar with ISO, the higher the ISO, the lower the light you can shoot in. Or the higher the f stop or faster the speed of the exposure. For example, I shot the below photo at ISO 1600, f/10 at 1/2500 second without image stabilization (forgot to turn it on!), and everything in the photo is in focus and sharp, from the person in the foreground to the mountains. Why did I shoot at f/10? This was shot with a super zoom lens, and lenses like this are usually sharpest between f/8 and f/11.
A problem I've seen in many online photos is a person or photo that is too dark. Or black eye sockets on people. It may be caused by your camera's (I'm including any device that can record images) metering system averaging everything in the scene, and the background is too bright, so the subject comes out dark. What can you do if this is the cause? Get a close-up meter reading of your subject, then switch your camera to manual mode and keep those settings you got from your subject, or switch the background to a brightness that closely matches your subject if that's possible. You can brighten your subject with a flash or a reflector (in the shot above, the girl was not posed, but if she had been, would have used a reflector to lighten the shadow on her face). Or in post processing (photo editing software) you can lighten the shadows, tone down the highlights, and much more. In the photo above, everything was lit about the same (no shade), so left the photo as it was SOC (Straight Out of Camera). Well, I did darken the sky a little and increase the contrast to highlight the clouds.
Remember, whatever you see will be close to what you will record with the camera assuming the contrast in the scene isn't too great. Your eye can compensate for high contrast a lot better than your camera can. If you see a harsh shadow or bright light on your subject's face, that is what you will get in the image, and perhaps a lot more so. What can you do to avoid this? Shoot early in the morning or late in the day. Or again, use a reflector to reflect more light onto the subject, move the subject into the shade, or use a building as a reflector. Or change the background if it's not that important. Alternatively, you can use a scrim (diffuser) held over the person to diffuse the light. As long as there is detail in the highlights and shadows, they can be recovered.
The direction of light can make a big difference in how someone looks. The wrong light can make someone look scary or terrible, the right light can make them look beautiful.
The larger the light source, the softer the image. Which is why the sun produces such hard shadows, just like a flash. But use a reflector as a light source, or a diffuser, well - check the images below, all shot on a bright sunlight day.
If you shoot in RAW mode rather than JPG, you will have a lot more information in the image to work with, enabling you to edit your image more accurately. If it's a contrasty scene, you have a better chance of keeping all the details.
Keep in mind that if you're using a blue building as a reflector, your subject is going to have a blue cast to them. And around sunset, things are going to look a bit red. These can be fixed pretty easily in photo editing software. Things can get more difficult when you have mixed lighting, like tungsten and flash and window light all mixed together.
I prefer shooting in natural light. Artificial lighting is another topic for another day, although it uses the same basic principles.
I used to shoot a lot of B&W film back in the film days. Now everything is shot in color as it is extremely easy to convert to B&W should I want. Below are some samples of photos using scrims or reflectors.
This photo was shot in bright sunlight at UCLA using a small hand held scrim (diffuser) held over her.
These two photos used a reflector to fill in the light. In the bottom shot, the sun was above and behind her.
Notice the difference in the two photos above. The top one was exposed for the background - they wanted to see the sunset in the photo. If I had had a large reflector or a powerful flash, it would have been possible to get a well-exposed photo of them and the setting sun. But because we didn't have that available, the light on the group was too low and the image suffered. In the image on the bottom, I exposed for the group and not the background - big difference. Getting back to equipment - these were shot with a Canon 40D which has a cropped frame sensor with 10.1 megapixels.
As mentioned at the beginning of this post, there are whole books written on lighting which go into much more detail. This was meant just to help improve the day to day results for the average person.
As I've mentioned in the past, eliminate the variables. Light is a variable, the f/stop is a variable, as is shutter speed, ISO, camera, lens, camera settings, subject, editing software, etc. By eliminating them as variables (which means understanding them and knowing how to use them), you will get great results. Hope this helped.
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