Light gets talked about like it comes in two flavors, good and bad, and that framing quietly limits what you shoot. Treating every kind of light as workable, rather than sorting it into keepers and mistakes, opens up scenes most people walk past.

That reframing runs through a three-part series on the elements of a photograph, and Dylan Goldby devotes this installment entirely to light after an earlier overview covered light, composition, and moment together. Goldby argues there’s no good or bad light, only light that suits the image you’re after. You can’t move the sun, but you decide where to stand relative to it, what you place in the light it makes, and how you set your exposure. He shoots differently for clients than for himself, chasing mood in both cases but staying more flattering for the paying work.

A few technical choices anchor the approach. Goldby recommends setting exposure and white balance manually while you learn to see, not as a permanent rule but as a way to understand how the camera reads a scene. Cameras see in absolutes, while your eyes and brain quietly correct a white sheet of paper to look white. Locking white balance to daylight all day teaches you the shifting colors light takes on from morning to night and from source to source. He also pushes back on HDR, preferring to let highlights blow out or shadows crush when the dynamic range forces a choice, because that decision is where the interpretation lives. He shot the same scene with the HDR Plus setting on his Fujifilm X-T50 and then at the sensor’s normal range, and the difference in feeling is obvious.

The heart of the video is a walk through kinds of light and how to expose for each. Overcast days give soft, even light that’s easy on exposure but hard to make interesting, so Goldby looks for overhangs, doorways, tunnel mouths, or trees to block light from a direction and shape it. Low, directional sun is his favorite, and along the Han River in Seoul he built a whole set of images within 10 meters just by changing his position relative to the sun. Backlight can become a silhouette when you expose for the sky, or a glowing subject when you expose for skin and let cheaper third-party lenses flare in ways Fujifilm glass won’t. Sidelight reveals texture and form, and he shows how a few degrees of movement toward a 90-degree angle changes how much dynamic range you’re fighting.

The quiet lesson underneath all of it arrives through a story about his friend. Asked how he metered a harsh, side-lit scene on an old DSLR, they answered, “What’s a light meter?” He didn’t know and didn’t care, and his images were stunning anyway. That’s the principle worth carrying forward, and it lines up with where camera technology has actually gone. Mirrorless bodies preview exposure before the shutter fires, so the old ritual of metering, adding two-thirds of a stop, and bracketing has largely dissolved into turning a dial until the preview looks right. This is a real shift in how people learn the craft. A generation is coming up without ever internalizing the zone system or a handheld meter, and the skill that replaces those habits is reading a scene emotionally and adjusting until the screen matches the feeling. If you started on film or early digital, retraining yourself to trust the preview instead of the math is one of the easier upgrades available, and it frees attention for composition and moment.

Midday sun, which many avoid, gets its own defense. Goldby finds graphic shadows under man-made structures, exposes to hold highlight detail, and lets shadows go black to build a frame he can drop a subject into. He waited out runners and a cyclist before a white bird landed inside his shadow pattern and completed the shot. He covers overhead venue lighting, pastel scenes handled with a touch of overexposure, and the narrow blue-hour window when you can balance city lights against a fading sky in a single exposure. For deeper study, he points to Michael Freeman’s book “Capturing Light,” which sorts light into far more categories than a single video can, and he notes that Nick Carver’s planned, pre-visualized approach is a valid opposite to his own find-it-as-you-go method.

Watch the full breakdown in the video above to see each lighting setup and exposure choice play out on real images.