Dappled light is one of my favorite kinds of light. I wanted to give you a quick introduction into how I use dappled light to frame smaller subjects, like flowers. You’re going to hear me say over and over, that the key to using dappled light is to be careful of where the shadows fall. I always look for pockets of light that are big enough for me to put my subject in. Here’s a pullback of my location. In the mornings, the sun shines through the tree outside and makes these cool shadows on the ground. Since there isn’t any pocket big enough to put a person’s face, I turned to flowers as a subject instead 😉 The other issue with using a person is that you’d have to have them lay on the ground as well to get their face in the pocket of light. That’s why I usually look for shadows falling on a wall if I’m looking to frame a person. But we’ll talk about that some other time! Or you can wait until Composing Boldly with Light comes out, because I’ll be going into a lot more detail in there :).

This is the first photo I took. You can see that I mostly placed the poppy in the pocket of light, but the very bottom is in the shadows, which is undesirable.

I tried moving it up into the pocket above that one, but that one wasn’t quite big enough. I’m not a fan of the shadows around the edges!

There we go! This one is better! Back into the old pocket, just a little higher. I do see the slight shadow on the right from a branch, but it doesn’t bother me too much 🙂

Next I wanted to see if I could highlight one part of a flower, but I don’t think it worked out too well! Maybe if I had gotten in closer and tilted the flower so that the top was all in the shadow to the right or something.

So I just found a pocket of light big enough for it instead 🙂

And here’s a black and white version!

Hope that helps you see how dappled light can be used to frame more macro-like shots! Can’t wait to see what you come up with!