Assignment Tasks:
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(c) Steve McCurry (Penn State Graduate) Make 5 photographs that focus on “light” and “shadow” as the primary content of the photographs.
- When submitting the photographs, include a brief written statement in Canvas where you, explain your concept of diversity, relate your experiences photographing the people, and include something you learned about them.
- Include in your written statement a brief self-evaluation of your work, essentially what did you do well and what can you do better?
There are several additional challenges for the assignment.
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(c) Paul Strand For at least two of the photographs, use light and shadow in a creative “abstract” manner. In these photographs, it is not necessary for the viewer to recognize the subject, but rather to experience the interesting shapes and forms created by the interactions of light and shadow.
- For at least two of the photographs, focus on the atmospheric effects of light. Consider photographing scenes where light passes through morning mist, the shadow and color effects of light at sunset or sunrise, light as it reflects off rain soaked streets, or any other creative variation of this challenge.
This Photography Assignment has three tasks you must complete
- Take photographs
- Write a statement about your photos
- Participate in Peer Review of ten classmates’ photos
Assignment goals:
- Students will demonstrate creative thinking skills in recognizing and photographing the effects of light in various ways, which employ acquiring photographic skills, taking creative risks, solving image making problems, and innovative thinking to create new and interesting images.
- Students will demonstrate visual communications skills by employing creative compositional organization and image content choices.
Meeting the assignment goals:
Acquiring photographic skills:
Use the camera exposure controls (aperture, shutter speed, ISO) to ensure adequate image brightness. Pick a lens focal length or zoom length that will be most effective for the photo. Your choices will be wide-angle, normal or long (zoomed in) focal lengths. Experiment with different shutter speeds, apertures and ISO settings.
Make sure you focus the image sharply where necessary. Sometimes autofocus cameras will focus elsewhere so double check the focus in the images you take and switch to manual focus if the camera will not cooperate with you.
Pay attention to your white balance. If you shoot in RAW, you can take the picture with any white balance setting and adjust it later when editing. Otherwise, set the camera’s white balance as needed.
A couple important points about light:
The most basic and important form of light is natural light, generally referring to any light created by sunlight. In other instances, ambient light (meaning the available light in an environment) can be considered as natural because it is not directly influenced by the photographer’s lighting equipment. This usually indicates natural lighting from outside that lights up a room through a window.
The four main characteristics that are used to categorize different types of light are color, intensity, direction, and quality.
Color temperature refers to the various shades of color that are produced by different light sources. It is measured on the Kelvin scale, from the cooler, blue-tinged end of the spectrum to the warmer, reddish-colored end. Color temperature changes throughout the day, depending on the time and the amount of clouds in the sky. At dawn, the sky appears light blue. At sunset, the sky appears orange (this is what photographers refer to as the golden hour or magic light); and at dusk, the sky appears violet-blue.
The intensity of light is a measure of its harshness or brightness and determines how much light is present in a scene. Intensity is sometimes referred to as “quantity of light.” You can estimate how intense light is based on the balance between shadows (the darker areas of your image) and highlights (the lighter areas of your image). This distinction between highlights and shadows is known as contrast.
Light is usually most intense at noon when the sun is directly overhead. Contrast at noon, therefore, is high and tends to make shadows more pronounced. On the other hand, light and contrast are less intense early in the morning or evening.
Depending on the time of day, the direction of light changes due to the sun’s movement. Given that the the sun is below the horizon at dawn and twilight, almost horizontal at sunrise, and is highest and nearly vertical midday, photographing at these different times of day produces largely different images.
Quality encompasses the other characteristics and can either be classified as hard/direct or soft/diffused. The smaller the light source is compared to a subject, the harder the quality, and as the light spreads and becomes bigger, the quality also becomes softer.
Taking Creative Risks:
There is no right or wrong here. Creativity can only flourish in an atmosphere of experimentation, openness, risk taking, playfulness, curiosity, and a sense of adventure. Play, do not worry about the outcome as you are taking pictures.
Solving image making problems:
What is the right exposure? Where to focus? What to include in the image? Do you meter for the bright or dark areas of the scene? You will be thinking about many different problems at the same time.
About High Dynamic Range (HDR):
Our eyes can perceive an extraordinary range of contrast in a scene, a range far greater than any camera’s sensor can capture. We see into a scene’s brightly lit areas, and we can also tell what’s going on in the shadows. The camera is going to have trouble capturing the ends of that drastic range. If you choose to meter for the highlights (the bright areas), you’ll lose pretty much all the detail in the shadow areas of the scene. Try it the other way—meter for the shadows—and it’s likely you’ll end up with what are commonly called “blown out” highlights.
A familiar example of that: a well-exposed room interior in which the windows are blazing with light. If you expose to capture what’s outside those windows, the room’s details are going to be lost in shadow. And when you shoot outdoors, the sunlight that creates bright highlights will also create dark shadows; expose for one and you lose detail in the other.
When you make an HDR image, you take a series of exposures at different shutter speeds—commonly called a bracket—to capture both highlights and shadow detail. What the bracket provides are exposures that, in total, contain all the highlight and shadow information the scene has to offer—in other words, the full range of the scene’s contrast. When you bring those exposures into an HDR software program, you can create a single image that represents the scene as you saw it.
If you use HDR on a smartphone, your phone does all the work for you—just snap your picture and it will take one regular photo and one HDR photo. (Note that if you turn HDR mode on, your phone takes a little longer to take the photo.)
No pressure to try this. This is just an option if you would like to experiment with HDR. Otherwise, you will need to decide what is more important: the detail in the brightest areas, the detail in the “middle tone” areas, or the detail in the darkest areas.
Innovative Thinking:
See the light not the object. Look for the light first, then find something to do within that light. If you have got a great scene but you do not have the light for it, there is probably not much you can do with it. This exercise is a way of exploring why light is so important in photography. You may find a whole new realm of subject matter that you might have not considered before.
Compositional Organization:
When photographing abstractions that have no clear recognizable or coherent “subjects” this can simply be a matter of arranging shapes and forms with the frame in an inventive or interesting manner, which engages the viewer in the visual experience.
Composition is arranging, creating, seeing, framing, and cropping. Elements of composition are patterns, texture, symmetry/asymmetry, depth of field, lines, curves, shapes, frames, contrast, color, viewpoint, depth, negative space/filled space, foreground/ background, visual tension. Use one or more of these elements to create a composition that works for your image. Of course, not all will be available at all times, but study them, recognize them, and employ them to help enrich your images.
Finally, know that, when it comes to composition, there is no right or wrong. There are no hard-and-fast rules. For every rule, there are countless images that break the rule.
Image content choices:
What do you include? What do you leave out? What is the main subject of the image? How do you manage an image that has no clear main subject? You will have to make choices.
Good composition is the process of arranging forms in a way that is pleasing and that guides the viewer’s eye to bring attention to the subject. In a good composition your eye will not search and wonder. You will immediately know what the subject of the image is. Pay attention to the function of your foreground and background.
Lynda Tutorials from the PHOTO 101 Playlist:
- LearninPhotography 101: Shooting with Low Light with Joseph Linaschkeg
- Lighting: Natural Light with Erin Manning
- Basic Abstract Photography
Additional Reading Assignment:
Peer Review Requirement:
After the photographic portion of the assignment is complete you will conduct a Peer Review of the work of ten of your photographer classmates through Canvas. In this review, you will give your opinion of the work from four perspectives. Peer review is an important way your classmates learn how effective their photos are with their audience. It is also a way you learn to effectively communicate exactly why an image
works or doesn’t work.
Please clearly and succinctly address these four areas in each of your ten Peer Reviews:
- What is your “gut” feeling of the photos? You can base this on your knowledge of the assignment problems from watching the tutorials, other images you have seen, and your experience doing this assignment as well.
- How well did your classmate apply the camera or lens skills discussed in the tutorials? Do you see evidence that he or she tried to apply creative techniques like using a long focal length (zoom) lens or using soft natural light from a window? Are the photos in focus? Did the photographer expose the photos properly? What can the photographer improve overall?
- How effectively did your classmate use the compositional techniques described in the tutorials to communicate something about the person photographed from either an aesthetic or an informational perspective? Give examples where this either happened or should have happened. Is there evidence of active composition? Are the backgrounds cluttered or distracting?
- How effectively did the photographer engage their subjects when photographing them? Base this assessment from what you see in the pictures. What is the visual evidence that the photographer sought to communicate something meaningful about the persons he or she photographed?
To ensure thoroughness, each Peer Review must be at least 250 words
Image effectiveness can be paradoxical. Sometimes an image can be very effective even if it has technical “flaws.” Or the image can technically perfect but be quite dull.
That assessment is basically your “gut response” to the image and it makes your criticism more complex than simply saying it is technically good or bad. Artfulness does not always arise from doing everything right. Sometimes an image has a kind of magic that makes it great. Explain clearly how an why it has or lacks that magic is a critical skill you can develop through your peer reviews.