Light As The Subject Of Your Photograph

 

“Photo” stands for “light” and its suffix “graphy” stands for “writing.” Photography means writing with light. Light is a photograph’s key ingredient. Without light, there is no photograph. Photographers develop a deep understanding of light—how it works and how to capture it, control it, enhance it, and use it creatively.

Now let’s make light itself your subject! 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. Your subject matter may be an interesting play of light, a surprising splash of light, or a stark contrast of light and shadow, etc.

You’ve probably noticed that good lighting will enhance your photographs. The light you capture in your image can draw in the viewer’s attention. Yet, let’s go beyond employing light in order to enhance the photographs. Make light the primary point of interest, the image’s most important feature.

This exercise is intended to help you see in a different way. Carry the camera with you all the time. Take a lot of photos. Upload your strongest 5 to Canvas (name them Photo1, Photo2, etc.).

The five selected photographs should be taken at five different locations. Give enough thought to the assignment to develop several unique approaches. They must be completely different compositions; they cannot be variations of the same photo. As always, no snapshots!

Include a brief statement (min. 200 words) that explains your approach to this task. As always, detail the photographic choices you made (in terms of aesthetics, subject matter and techniques) and include technical details (aperture, shutter speed, ISO or any other technical details your peers might find helpful).

For at least one of the five photographs, use light and shadow in a creative abstract manner. In this photograph, 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 one of the photographs, focus on the atmospheric effects of light. You may photograph scenes where light passes through morning mist or light as it reflects off rain-soaked streets, for example.

I encourage you to avoid photographing the sunset or the sunrise for this assignment. If you cannot resist, you may include one image, at most, of either a sunrise or a sunset among your top five images. However, it has to be properly exposed and it should not look unnatural.

Do not photograph light sources as your main subject (artificial or natural, such as light bulbs, lamp posts, televisions, candles, fire, etc.). Instead, focus on the illumination of scenes and patterns of light.

You may choose to photograph at night. Unlike with daytime shoots the light does not change at night — it is very much the same throughout the night. In low light the image will take longer to register on the sensor. That means your shutter speed has to be slower just to get the shot. Open up your aperture, slow down your shutter speed, raise the ISO. Use a tripod (you can rent one from MTSS, no fees). Start with a few test shots to establish the optimal shutter speed.

Find innovative, imaginative and experimental solutions to this challenge. You can take pictures indoors or outdoors using natural or artificial light. You may choose to convert your image to monochrome if black and white has more impact (for example, if you want to exaggerate contrast or emphasize silhouettes).

Do your best to follow the camera and compositional techniques addressed in the video tutorials you have watched so far. You may wish to use a large RAW format file for your personal needs but use jpegs for the online upload. 

I strongly recommend that you revisit Chapters 7 (Light) & 8 (Workshop: Finding Light) of the previous tutorial (Photography Foundations: Composition by Ben Long; 5h29m)

 

Learning Objectives

 

Creative Thinking

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 does not cooperate with you. 

Pay attention to your white balance. It’s not just different light sources that can give you different color temperatures. Different lighting conditions can also have different color temperatures. 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. Often times, accurate color rendition is going to call for a manual white balance setting. Typical settings include “sun”, “shade”, “tungsten” and “fluorescent”. Some cameras come with the option to manually set a color temperature by choosing a specific Kelvin value.

A couple important points about light:

The most basic 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. 

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. In photography, the golden hour is the period of daytime shortly after sunrise or before sunset, during which daylight is redder and softer than when the sun is higher in the sky.

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.

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. Hard light is a focused, often bright light that casts harsh shadows and draws attention to a specific part of a photo. In hard lighting, the transition between the light and the shadows is very harsh and defined. Think of hard light as how things look on a sunny day, with the sun shining directly onto an object. Hard light is created by setting up a single point of light that casts very distinct shadows and provides a high-contrast look to your shot. A camera flash is an example of a light that creates hard light.

The tutorial titled Learning Lighting: Natural Light will give you some background and vocabulary for understanding and describing light. Pay especially close attention to the chapters Understanding Light and Working with Light.

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 while 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. 

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 the way you might in a DSLR Nikon, Canon, etc. 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. JPEG images are more difficult to adjust for color, contrast, and brightness. RAW images have more image data and therefore give you more possibility to adjust images shot under unusual lighting conditions.

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. Or 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

Look for the light first. 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.

 

Visual Communications

Compositional organization

Pay attention to the compositional concepts we have discussed: a clearly defined subject and background, a sense of balance, a point of view, and a degree of simplicity.

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. 

Image content choices

What do you include? What do you leave out? What is the main subject of the image? 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.