dPS Bi-Weekly Photo Challenge – Hard Light vs Soft Light

For the next two weeks your challenge is to make TWO photos! One using hard light, and one that uses soft light.

Very basically, hard light produces hard shadows cast from your subject, Where soft light produces (you guessed it!) softer shadows! You will find more direct light sources producing hard shadows and thus hard light, where diffused light typically gives you a softer quality of light, my example below (sorry, used my phone, it’s after midnight! I’ve been having photo storage issues (hard disks are either dead or dying from the very first time you use them! don’t ask!) shows hard and then soft. You can use hard light to show detail and strong contrast, it’s typically a little harder to master when you’re starting out, but fun to play with. Softer light is generally great for portraits, so you could try your hand at soft and hard lit portraits, or food or pets or well… anything you like! Two photos, Two weeks, Go!

Make sure you include the hashtags #dPSWeeklyChallenge and #dPSHardLightSoftLight in your post, here in the comments or over on social media. You can tag us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter!

This is what hard looks like, you can see I shone a torch (small light source) onto a rock and produced a hard shadow..

In the frame below, you can see I used a small white box (literally a white cardboard box, you could use paper or pretty much anything to diffuse light, you can also try messing about with tinfoil to create crazy hard light, too!) ..that I pointed the torch at, diffused the harsh torch light and it softened the shadow and gave the rock a softer light.

Make sure you include the hashtags #dPSWeeklyChallenge and #dPSHardLightSoftLight in your post, here in the comments or over on social media. You can tag us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter!

Find all of our previous weekly challenges here.

Simply upload your shot into the comment field (look for the little camera icon in the Disqus comments section) and they’ll get embedded for us all to see or if you’d prefer, upload them to your favourite photo-sharing site and leave the link to them. Show me your best images in this week’s challenge. Sometimes it takes a while for an image to appear so be patient and try not to post the same image twice.

Share in the dPS Facebook Group

You can also share your images in the dPS Facebook group as the challenge is posted there each week as well.