Light as the Subject of your Photograph

Light as the Subject of your Photograph

Make 10 photographs that focus on “light” and “shadow” as the primary content of the photographs.

Include a brief self-evaluation of your work  as a Word Doc on OneDrive along with your images.. Explain what did well and what can you do better.

For at least four 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 four 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

1) Take photographs
2) Write a statement about your photos
3) Participate in Peer Review of classmates’ photos in class

When making Peer Review comments please refer to what you learned in your Lynda tutorials when possible and comment on  how well your classmate accomplished the following topics:

* Taking creative risks when photographing
* Solving technical image related problems associated with photographing light
* Compositional organization
* Image content choices

These topics are described in further detail below.

It is light that makes a photo. For this assignment, it is light itself that is the subject of the image. So walk around looking for light. Let light become the reason to take the photo, not just an aside to the photo. Let it play the central role in your image. It may be interesting plays of light, a surprising splash of light or a stark contrast of light and shadow, etc.

The elements that make up that day – the time, the weather, the cloudscape, and the lighting give you an opportunity to make the shot your own, regardless of how many times it has been photographed. The light you capture in your photograph can draw in the viewer’s attention, and make them feel differently than they felt looking at another image shot in the same location.

This assignment is intended to make you see in a different way. It encourages you to think not about the objects around you but the light. This is to explore, to have fun, to play. Take a lot of photos. Upload your strongest 5 to your blog.

You can take pictures indoors or outdoors using natural or artificial light, daytime or night time. Your images may be black and white or color. Do your best to follow the camera and compositional techniques addressed in the lynda tutorials you have watched so far. You may wish to use a large RAW format file for your personal needs but use a smaller jpeg format image for the online upload.

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.

The Lynda tutorial, Learning Light, Natural Light Photography will give you some background and vocabulary for understand and describing light. This will be especially helpful when doing your required Peer Reviews. Pay especially close attention to the chapters Understanding Light and Working with Light.

Pay close attention to  Lynda tutorial, Photography 101 ,chapter 8, Change Your Point of View. In this chapter you will learn about changing point of view to make photographs from different angles and perspectives.

In your assigned  Lynda tutorial Photography 101 pay special attention to two chapters, P is not Perfect and Settings in the Real World. Today,  many cell photo camera apps are equipped with professional “modes” or settings that will allow you to adjust the settings on your cell phone camera similar to way you might in a DSLR Nikon, Canon etc. Using these apps the information in your Lynda tutorials, can be applied to the settings on your camera apps. The technical goal is to take control of the camera settings available to you so you can photograph under interesting or challenging lighting conditions. Look for “RAW” and HDR setting that can enhance your image control.

RAW and JPEG are types of image files. JPEG is the common files we use and send over the internet. It allows image compression to reduce the size on an image file for transmission over the web, e-mail, etc. JPEG images can lose quality in the compression and are more difficult to adjust for color, contrast, and brightness. Whereas RAW images have more image data and therefore give you more possibility to adjust images shot under unusual lighting conditions. Companies such as Adobe have free image apps for the cell phone.

Penn State has an arrangement with Adobe so you as students can download the Adobe Creative Suite, including Photoshop.  go to https://adobe.psu.edu/

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.

Composition should help identify, emphasize, complement, isolate, or highlight the subject—not detract from it.

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.

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.