page_title: Fill light
section_title: Techniques
hierarchical_section_title: Fill light / Techniques
caption_attribution_description: English: A female model wearing jeans standing in California desert scenery, Kern County. Photographed with a Nikon D700 with ND4 filter. Settings: 1/200 ƒ/4.5 70mm. Strobist Info: SB-900 and shoot-thru just out of frame, camera left at 1/2 power Triggered via Pocket Wizard
context_page_description: In television, film, stage, or photographic lighting, a fill light may be used to reduce the contrast of a scene to match the dynamic range of the recording media and record the same amount of detail typically seen by eye in average lighting and considered normal. From that baseline of normality using more or less fill will make shadows seem lighter or darker than normal which will cause the viewer to react differently, by inferring both environmental and mood clues from the tone of the shadows.
  Natural skylight fill is omnidirectional and diffuse, with lower rate of inverse-square fall-off than artificial sources. A common artificial lighting strategy which creates an overall appearance similar to natural fill places the fill light on the lens axis so it will appear to cast few if any shadows from the point of view of the camera, which allows the key light which overlaps it to create the illusion of 3D in a 2D photo with the same single source patterns typically seen with natural lighting where the sun acts as key light and the skylight as fill.
context_section_description: Shoot Thru Umbrella (Shoot-Through) is where light passes through an umbrella as opposed to being reflected by it. The umbrella acts as a light diffuser, softening the light and allowing it to spread over the subject evenly.
caption: With the sunlight coming from the right and behind the model, a shoot-through umbrella (on camera left) was used to illuminate her.
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