Settings & Exposure

Step outside on a Highveld winter morning, turn towards the rising sun, and you will quickly see why backlight photography has such a devoted following. Low light filtering through dry, faintly dusty air outlines everything in its path, from grass stems to a passer-by’s hair. Pointing your lens towards the light can feel counter-intuitive at first, but once you understand the direction of light in photography and how your camera responds to it, backlight becomes one of the most rewarding tools available. This guide explains how backlight behaves, the two signature looks it produces, the camera settings that control it and how to apply it across five common subjects.

Backlight photography and the direction of light: front light vs backlight

Backlight photography and the direction of light

Photographers usually describe light by where it comes from relative to the camera. Front light falls on the subject from behind the photographer, giving even, shadow-free illumination but little sense

Photograph the same city street at noon and again under thick cloud, and you will end up with two very different pictures. At midday, hard shadows slice across the pavement and every edge looks crisp; under cloud, the scene settles into gentle, even tones. The difference is contrast, and learning to see and control it is one of the most useful skills in photography. This guide explains the meaning of contrast, the four main types, how its strength shapes mood and the practical ways to adjust it, with examples from portraits, landscapes and street snaps.

The meaning of contrast in photography

The meaning of contrast in photography

Contrast in photography has two related meanings. In its technical sense, it describes the difference between light and dark tones, and between colours, within an image. A frame with deep blacks and bright whites has high contrast; one where most tones sit close together has low contrast.

In a broader, compositional sense, contrast means placing different elements

Exposure is the single decision that most shapes how a photograph looks, and it is the one South African light makes hardest. A camera meter is a reasonable instrument that reaches reasonable conclusions, but under a clear summer sky at altitude it will hand you a sky without colour, a face in shadow, or beach sand rendered a dull grey. None of those are faults. They are the meter doing exactly what it was designed to do, on a scene it was not designed for. This article covers what exposure is, the three settings that determine it, and how exposure compensation lets you overrule the camera when its answer is not the one you wanted.

What is exposure, and how exposure works

Exposure is the total quantity of light the image sensor receives while the shutter is open. Too much and the image is pale and washed out, with white areas holding no detail. Too little and it is dark and muddy, with shadows that contain nothing to recover.

How exposure works in practice is a matter of three controls

Light in South Africa is unforgiving. At altitude on the Highveld, under a clear summer sky at midday, the gap between the brightest and darkest parts of a scene can be enormous, far wider than what a camera records in a single frame. The result is familiar: a sky that goes white, a subject that goes black, or both at once. Understanding dynamic range is what separates a photographer who works around those conditions from one who is defeated by them. This article explains what dynamic range is, how it is measured, and how to get the most out of yours.

What is dynamic range in a camera?

Dynamic range is the span of brightness a camera can record in one exposure, from the darkest tone that still holds detail through to the brightest tone that has not turned to pure white.

Your eyes are far better at this than any sensor. Human vision adapts continuously, the iris adjusting while the brain merges information gathered across those adjustments, so you can stand on a shaded stoep and read detail

The same subject photographs as a different colour depending on what is lighting it. A white wall recorded at midday, again in open shade, and again under the lights inside a house will come back as three different colours, even though you saw one wall all day. Your eyes corrected for the light without asking you; the camera did not. White balance is the control that performs that correction, and once you understand it, the same control becomes one of the more useful creative tools on the camera. This article covers what white balance is, how colour temperature works, what each preset does, and how to use both deliberately.

What is white balance?

Human vision has a property called colour constancy. A white gable wall in the Bo-Kaap reads as white at eleven in the morning and still reads as white at six in the evening, even though the light falling on it has shifted dramatically towards orange. Your visual system discounts the light source and reports the surface.

A camera does no such thing.

Of the three controls that decide how a photograph looks, shutter speed is the one worth learning first. Aperture and ISO affect brightness and, in aperture's case, how much of the scene stays sharp. Shutter speed does all of that and one thing more: it decides what movement looks like. The same scene at 1/2000 sec and at half a second produces two completely different photographs — one a frozen instant the eye could never have held, the other a smear of motion that no single moment contains. This guide covers what shutter speed is, how it interacts with everything else, and the settings that work for ten specific subjects.

What is shutter speed?

What shutter speed means

Shutter speed is simply how long the shutter stays open, and therefore how long the sensor is collecting light. Nothing is recorded before it opens or after it closes. You will also see it called exposure time in camera menus and specification sheets, which is the more literal description of the same thing.

It is written

Most guides to photographing illumination were written for the northern hemisphere, where the festive season falls in the depths of winter and darkness arrives by four in the afternoon. South Africa inverts all of it. Our festive lights go up in November and burn through a high-summer December, which means waiting out a long warm evening before there is enough darkness to shoot in — sunset lands somewhere between seven and eight depending on where in the country you are, and you want another forty-five minutes on top of that before the lights read properly against the sky. The air is warm, the evenings are long, and the shooting window is narrower than you would expect. This guide covers where festive lights photograph well, the settings that get you there, and the creative techniques worth trying once the basics are working.

Where festive lights photograph well: four scenes

Illumination rewards matching your approach to the setting. Four situations cover most of what you will encounter,

South Africa's fireworks season falls in December and January, when displays go up over harbours, stadiums and waterfronts on warm nights that stay light until well after seven. Photographing them looks harder than it is. The subject is bright, its shape is predictable even when its timing is not, and it sits against a black sky that does most of the compositional work for you. Get the exposure settings and the lens right and the rest is patience. This guide covers both.

What you need for fireworks photography

Fireworks photography asks for a wide field of view, a long exposure and a camera that does not move. That combination sets the kit list. Here is what to have with you before the first shell goes up.

Capture the whole display with a wide-angle lens

A wide-angle lens — roughly 35mm or shorter — is what lets you fit an entire display into the frame without clipping the tops off the highest bursts. It also gives you room to include what sits underneath: a harbour wall, a crowd, a city

Magic hour photography in South Africa rewards anyone willing to plan. Twilight at our latitudes is short. The light that turns the Karoo amber, or drops a deep blue behind the Sandton skyline, arrives quickly and leaves just as fast. Get the timing right and an ordinary street corner in Braamfontein or a stretch of shoreline near Umhlanga becomes something worth printing.

This guide covers what happens to the light during the golden and blue hours, which camera settings suit each, how to compose while the light is falling, and what to look for in a lens when the window is measured in minutes.

What is magic hour photography?

Magic hour photography covers two connected windows: the golden hour and the blue hour. Each produces its own gradient across the sky, and each asks something different of your camera. The golden hour gives you warmth, long shadows and a soft glow around your subject. The blue hour trades that for cool, even light and a sky deep enough to make artificial lighting count.

Aperture shapes a photograph more decisively than any other setting. It governs how much light reaches the sensor, and it decides whether the background behind your subject dissolves into a soft wash of colour or stays sharp enough to count the leaves.

Different scenes call for different apertures. The settings that suit a portrait taken on a stoep in the last hour of afternoon light are nothing like the ones you would reach for at the top of Chapman’s Peak Drive with the whole Atlantic seaboard in front of you. This guide works through what aperture in photography actually is, how it interacts with shutter speed and ISO, and which f-stops to reach for across portraits, landscapes, night scenes, astrophotography and sport.

What Is Aperture in Photography?

The aperture is an adjustable opening inside the lens, formed by a ring of overlapping blades. Widening or narrowing that opening controls how much light passes through to the sensor. The measurement describing how far open it sits is