Take Better Pictures with SCIENCE! - EMF 2026

Thank you. Um, and good morning. Uh, it's very early, so thank you all for being here at uh, 10:00 a.m. after late last night. Um, so yeah, this is taking pictures with science. And I have skipped through two slides already. There we go. Taking better pictures with science. Um, so yeah, this is basically uh for people who want to do better pictures with any camera, whether that's a a DSLR or an old film camera or whether that is just your iPhone or even a uh a point andoot like an Instax or something like that. Uh so to start with, if I can There we go. Uh here are two images that I shot yesterday afternoon while I was here at camp with my iPhone. Um and I ask, what do you see is different? Do you see a difference between these two images on the right and the left? Um on the left, uh we've got some very hard shadows. We've got some very bright highlights. Everything is in focus and very flatl looking. On the right, we've got much nicer, even more flattering lighting. We've got um a background that is uh out of focus so that you can uh see the subject better. We've got basically a the right is a more traditional portrait type photo. The left is more of a snapshot or the type of photo that if you just whip your camera out and point it at someone, that's the photo you're going to get. So we have two very different photos taken at the same time at the same location with the same settings at the same time of day. So and they look extremely different. So the question is why? Why do they look so different? And the answer to that is not your gear, it's the light that you use. Uh photography is the science of light essentially mixed in with some art and some creativity. And if you understand the physics of light, then you are 90% of the way there to taking better photos. Um, a common thing when people start getting into photography is they think that they need the best camera gear, they need the best lenses, they need the best bodies, they need all of the gear. Um, in the photography world, we call that gas. Uh, gear acquisition syndrome. Uh my husband's a musician and he understands that because for musicians it's the same thing. I need the new gear. I need the new gear. This will all make me better. But it's not necessary to be better to have all of the gear. What is important is understanding light. So your gear doesn't matter. Your location doesn't matter. Light is 90% of the way there. And then a little understanding of composition will get you the last 10% of the way. Uh the four images that we have up here are all taken with no modifiers. Uh they're all taken on different cameras and at different locations, but one thing that they all have in common is good light and attention to the composition. Uh the one on the iPhone I took at Burning Man. Um when I got my phone out, it initially I got some terrible glare from the sun. It kind of whited everything out. I just took a step to one side and got a much better picture. The photo above that I did with a toy camera and I was experimenting at a wedding workshop. Uh we had overhead clouds and we ended up getting a much nice evenly lit photo just by making sure they were positioned in the correct place for the light for the one from London that was taken at night and with a long exposure. The one underneath that's a wedding photo that I did in Las Vegas. Again, it was there was no additional flashes or big soft boxes or reflectors or anything else. These were just about where I put the subjects. No, no extra gear needed. So, you don't need all that gear. You just need to know a little bit about light. Uh figured out to give you a little bit of the usual obligatory about me. Um my name is Elizabeth Lamb. My pronouns are she, her. I am a professional portrait photographer and have been doing portrait photography for 25 years now. Uh which is still astounding to me. Uh I am a scientist. I work in forensic toxicology. Uh mostly with uh drugs of abuse is my specialist subject. So if you ever have a question like oh I take a lot of satalopram. Should I take this LSD? Come ask me. I can tell you about it. And the answer is no. By the way, you should definitely not mix those two. Um, I do sticker design. I was fascinated by the workshop yesterday where they were doing stickers with a Cricut and Canva because I do stickers with Photoshop and Silhouette. It's so similar. And I'm like, "Oh, this is my jam." So, you can come talk to me about sticker design, printing, and cutting. I'm a former teacher. Um, I have taught some photography workshops. I have also was a pre-K teacher, so I'm used to explaining things to people literally like they're five. Um, so, but this is a big bit different. So, excuse me if I'm a little nervous. You guys are much older and smarter than my 5-year-olds. Um, and a little bit about me, I love sharks. I love every camp that has a blue high hanging from them. It's just or in their tent. I think blue high is fantastic. um both as a shark and as a symbol. Uh I love cozy gaming. Come talk to me about Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley. And I love creating inclusive spaces. Um in photography, there isn't a lot of opportunity for women. Despite women being uh buying more camera gear than men these days, it's still kind of a sausage fest out there for the professionals. So, I am working right now on creating a more inclusive intersectional feminist space for everybody, including a nanorimo style uh photography event uh hopefully for next spring. So, that's the obligatory about me. Also, um if you didn't notice the accent, I am American. I'm from New Jersey, so I talk very fast. So, I will be doing Q&A afterwards. If there's anything you missed, please come talk to me. I can try to go back and explain it slower for you. Uh so light light is physics. It is not magic. When I started photography, I was in a professional studio. Uh my uh journey was basically I did photography for a year in high school. I found it really fun. I saw a photo studio that said now hiring and I was like, "Oh, cool. I can be a photographer. I'm 18 and I have all the confidence of an 18-year-old." So, I walked in with a portfolio and said, "Hi, hire me." And they said, "Well, actually, we're just looking for someone to run the front desk, but they still did give me a job and I eventually worked from there." But it was a very weird journey because everything in a studio like that is preset up for you. You have every light modifier, every light type available to you. And it feels like magic when you first get into a massive studio with all of these lights. And I didn't learn for a long time how that all worked, why it all worked. I just went in, did my setup, and said, "Oo, magic. This is this is amazing." Took me a few years. But what I learned is it is not magic. It is just science. So there's four good rules of light in photography. Uh there is the exposure on your picture. There is the inverse square law of light. There is the law of reflection. And there's the law of reflectance. And we're going to go over all four of those today. And hopefully if we have time, we'll do a little bit of talking about composition, which is bas which is just a little bit of math on top of your physics. So this is exposure or the exposure triangle. I took my husband to his first photo conference and he heard so much about the exposure trial triangle he called it the triangle of doom because it was that intimidating. Um, so you have three sides to your triangle. You have the aperture and f-stop, which is basically how much light like volutrically hits the sensor. Every camera, whether it is a little Polaroid or an iPhone or a big DSLR uh has a sensor in it and it is photosensit, it is obviously photosensitive. um how much light comes into that through uh six blades that are kind of interwoven to make a hexagon. That is your aperture. Um the smaller the number, the larger the opening is and the more light you let in. The uh larger the number, so your f18, your f-22, then that means it's a much smaller opening, so a lot less light is coming in. There is a trade-off. you get a lot of light in with the wide open aperture, but you lose a lot of your what we call uh depth of field or your uh focal length. So, for example, with the photo I took yesterday, that beautiful blurry background was because it had a very shallow depth of field. Uh when you have everything in that aperture wide open, it turns how much stays in focus into a tiny little like slice. As the aperture gets smaller, the amount that stays in focus gets bigger. So, that is your trade-off for how much light you're letting in is that you get uh less in focus the more light that you let in through your aperture. Um, but we can counteract that. We can counteract that with your shutter speed. Your shutter is how fast the light comes in and is then cut off. So, it's kind of it is a curtain. We literally call it a rear curtain. Um, it just opens and closes at different speeds from 1 second to 125th of 200 1 250th of a second and even faster. Um, again, the longer the shutter is open, the more light comes into the sensor and so you get to see you get more light. Again, the trade-off is in this case motion. If you have a long exposure, which is like 30 seconds, a second, a minute, you get blur, but you get a lot of light. So, if you have your a very narrow aperture like the photo I had up earlier of um St. Paul's, then you see that it's cris everything is crystal clear except for that very blurry water and it's at night and that's because I needed to let in as much light as possible because it's very very dark down on the banks of the tempames. But I also wanted to leave that water all nice and kind of milky looking. So needed a long shutter speed and needed a small aperture. That these things work together to create a good exposure. The last part of the triangle and the part I always forget about because I'm from film initially is the um ISO or ISO. Um that is a holdover from the film days. It was about how sensitive your film is. Um, a 100 is not so sensitive, but it it's really good for high-speed photography. Uh, all the way up to 6400 or even higher. That's really good for capturing motion, but you get what's called grain, which is kind of which is just kind of looks like pixelation almost on your image. Um, back in the film days, 400 was what most people used. uh 200 was what we used in a portrait studio because what was more important was the quality of the image not so much you know capturing the uh motion or capturing things in all sorts of light. So if you are you need uh a lot of light but your aperture is already as open as it can be for the focus and your shutter speed is already as slow as it can be without getting camera shake or blur. you can just turn up that ISO. The thing that you're going to sacrifice there is the uh graininess of your image. Um, and if you're thinking, okay, this is all very technical and it sounds like a thing for a DSLR, almost every camera that you pick up, whether it's an iPhone or a uh point andoot or even um some of the digital instant cameras that you might see, they have the ability to control shutter speed and aperture. Um, my iPhone photo, I was able to make those uh controls so that I could take those photos that I showed you. Um, you just have to know where to look. Uh, and you can just go online. There are tons of videos that'll show you exactly how to find the slider to control your uh, aperture and to control the shutter speed. There's also a lot of apps. If you just want to, you know, have your Android device out there to take pictures, you can go get an app, um, that'll give you that kind of control. So, this is where we're going to get a little bit more technical. This is the inverse square law of light. Uh essentially the intensity falls off with the square distance from the point of the source. In other words, the larger the light source is relative to your subject, the um softer or nicer the light is going to be. You're going to get very even lighting like we saw in the second photo that I took yesterday. you're going to get um you're not going to see a lot of lines, wrinkles, under eye bags, etc. Um the but the smaller the light source is relative to the subject, the harder it's going to be. You're going to have big white highlights. You're going to have dark black shadows and there's going to be crisp lines uh delineating those. Your skin doesn't look so good in hard lighting like that because if you have a spot on your face, you're going to see the shadow that it makes. It's going to stand out. So, in portrait photography, we want to have that nice soft light. And so, we want to have a larger light source relative to our subject. And the important thing to remember about that is that it is relative. The sun is a very large object. However, relative to a tiny human on Earth, it's a very tiny source of light. And so, when you're lighting someone with direct sunlight, you get really hard light. Um, I'm going to go back to that first slide to bring up that those photos again. The difference here is the photo on the left was taken indirect sunlight. I had my husband stand in front of a white tent wall, took a picture with my iPhone. The sun said relative to him here on Earth, it's a very tiny source of light. And so you get those really harsh shadows. You get the really bright white in the background. All I did to change that light on him was ask him to turn 180°. So we went from the white wall of the tent to that white wall now turns into a massive reflector and it reflects all of that sunlight back onto him. That white wall is a huge source of light. And so without any modifiers, I have now taken the sun, which is I said tiny relative to him, and I've made it into a massive light that can illuminate and make it nice soft light. And soft light is flattering for most people and most of what you're going to want to use a light for when you're taking a photo. So that is the inverse square law. Basically, if you have a light and it's just you're getting some weird shadows, you can just move it closer to the person because as it gets closer, it is relative getting relatively bigger to the subject and you're getting a nicer even spread of light. If you pull it back, it's got you're going to get harsher shadows. So, the next bit and these kind of go together and tie back to what I was just talking about is the law of reflection and the law of reflectance. The law of reflection is that the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection. What this means is when you have a light source and it comes in at the angle that it hits at, it's the angle it's going to go back out of. So diagram there, you can see that put the sun at about 45° angle. If it hits something that's at 90, it's coming back out at that 45°ree angle. Why this is important is this is one of the most common causes of uh red red eye and uh lens glare. If you've got your camera and you're just using whatever the on camera flashes, A, it's very tiny. So, we're getting very hard light out of it. And B, it's pointed directly at that person. So, the light goes out from the camera, hits the person, and comes directly back to your lens. And you get that reflection of the light. And that's what camera or that's what uh glasses glare is. It is just the reflection of the light that you're shining directly at the person coming right back into the lens. And the way to do take care of this, it's real simple. You just if they're wearing glasses, you can take their glasses and just tilt them down like that. Now the light comes in, hits the thing that's now bouncing it down that way, not bouncing it back into the into the the lens. If you have a light that is off of your camera, you can move the light up, changing the angle so that it doesn't bounce back into your lens. Um, and of course, you can just turn the light off on your camera. If you have a new generation Android or iPhone, the cameras are really good. You do not need the auto flash. So, just use the available light and you will lose your glasses glare. you will lose your red light or red uh eye. The law of reflectance is that 90% of light is reflected by pure white. 90% of light is absorbed by pure black. This is important for the photo I did yesterday. I needed a better light source than the sun. I had a big white wall. It's not pure white, but it's pretty close. So, I knew that as much of the light from the sun that I was was going to hit it was going to bounce back onto my subject. So, put him in front of that nice big white wall. He's just getting hit from the sun. Move him 180°. Use that white wall to bounce the light to reflect that light onto him. And I'm getting this big light because it's reflecting 90% of that light back, give or take, cuz it's not a pure white wall. Um, if you look at the slide, um, you'll see there is a hot spot on his head from where the sun was overhead. If I was using any kind of modifier, I could just take a black flag or a black piece of cardboard or black piece of felt or velvet and have someone hold it at just the right angle and the that light would be absorbed and not hit his forehead. So I could just have someone holding that black that well that that black line there on the diagram and that would have taken care of that hot spot on his head because again if it's pure black it's absorbing 90% of that light. So if you need to light something better look for something that's bright white. If you need to get rid of some light to subtract it from your image find something that's as close to pure black as possible. So that is all of the science of light that uh will get you like I said about 90% of the way there to taking a better photo. The last bit that last 10% is your image composition. There are two very common ways to take a better picture uh when you're composing it. We have the golden rectangle which I'm sure you've all seen before. It's based on the golden ratio because it occurs so frequently in nature uh psychologically it's considered just intrinsically pleasing and aesthetically pleasing. So when we see something that has the golden ratio we just feel good about it. We just like it feels natural or gravitate toward it makes us feel good. It's a little harder to compose for however than the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds is take whatever rectangle you've got um whether it's your camera and you're shooting um full-on in 9 by6 or on your phone or whether you've got a point and shoot and you're taking 2x3 ratio rectangle you divide it in thirds horizontally divide it in thirds vertically where the lines intersect are your points of interest and the eye this is um has a particular path that it follows when it's looking at an image. When it's looking at an image, it goes from that top left. That's where your eye goes first and spends 40% of its time. Then it goes down to the bottom left. Then it kind of diagonally goes back up to the top right. And then it goes down to the bottom right. And this is important because psychologically the thing that we see first feels very comfortable. We like it. So, if you've got a photo of you, let's say, standing in front of a landmark, you want to position yourself in the left of that image and have your face either in that top uh left intersection or the bottom left intersection cuz our eyes will see it first. We think that's great. Um, where you kind of want to avoid if you're just taking a better photo for your wall or for the holidays is that lower right uh intersection. uh psychologically because it's the last thing we see. Our eyes gravitating toward it, but we feel uncomfortable about it. There's something that just is a little unsettling and off-putting when the thing we know we're supposed to focus on is the thing that is kind of down in the bottom corner here leading us out of the picture. So, if if you're doing a piece of art and you want everyone to feel a little uneasy, you want to capture something that's a little uncomfortable, then that's excellent. Put them down in the lower right. But for your holiday pictures, you really want to stay on that left side. It will just again because of the nature of how we look at things and because of the psychology of things, it will just make it a pleasing image. Before I wrap up, I wanted to give you four takeaways that you can do today to make a better photo using all that stuff that I just talked about. Uh, first thing I cannot emphasize it enough is turn off the auto flash on whatever camera you're using. I have an Instax in my tent and I found out you can turn the auto flash off on that. So if you can turn it off on a Polaroid, you can turn it off on anything. Android, iPhone, uh, I have a Sony point and shoot. Can turn that off. You can turn it off on any camera you have. And all of them are really good at going for available light and using the available light to get you a pretty good exposure. So just turn that off and you'll be doing so much better. Be doing it yourself a huge favor. The next is use the lines in your viewfinder. Uh the rule of thirds is the easiest of the composition techniques. So, just use the lines that are in the viewfinder of your camera. If you have an old film camera or a newer DSLR, uh, my point and shoot has those lines on the back viewfinder screen. Um, my iPhone when I pull it up, there is a setting that just brings up those lines. So, com take a second before you take the shot and compose. Look at the lines. Line the thing up according to the intersections. Try to stay to the left side of those lines and you will get a much better composition that just naturally feels better to people. Third thing is be sun aware. Like I said, it is a very hard light because it's relatively small compared to us here on Earth. So, what you want to do is when you're taking a picture, where is the sun and where will it be? Because maybe you want to take this picture cuz you're on vacation. You're by the pool and it's really awesome. Can you the water is going to be reflecting it that cement's going to act as a reflector and light's going to be bouncing everywhere and you're not going to get necessarily the best picture. Can you come down later at the uh golden hour or the blue hour, which is the hour right before sunset and right after sunset when the light isn't as harsh and you have a not a lot of more even nice lighting. Think about that. Think about where the sun is positioned. As with the first two photos I showed you, if you just turn them so that their back is to the sun and something else is reflecting on them, their eyes will be open in the picture for one thing, cuz they won't be squinting into the sun and you'll lose all of those horrible underline bags and emphasis on lines on your face. And finally, get a piece of cheap white cardboard that you or a fold up white reflector or anything small and white that you can take with you. If you are one of those people that want to take pictures of your food and everything that you do, just have a little pop-up white reflector. Instant better photos for whatever you're take for your Instagram or whatever you're using. So, those are your four takeaways that you can do this weekend to get take some better photos. So that is my presentation. Um the slides are available online. You I also have a fake link a fake link tree that you can scan the QR code to go to so that you can follow me on Facebook, Insta, uh Blue Sky, all of those, download the slides, and it'll have a link to the video presentation when the video is up and revealable. Uh, so thank you guys again so much for showing up at 10:00 a.m. after most of us are up till 2 or 3:00 a.m. And um, if you have any questions, I'll be in the Q&A tent outside. So, thank you so much.