The importance of light
Tuesday, 11 March 2008
The more I think about photography, the more I appreciate how important light is, how much there is, where it's coming from, how its being reflected, how hard or soft it is. This has been emphasised recently to me in my introduction to flash photography in trying to visualise how a photograph will look with one or two instantaneous light sources positioned about the subject. It is not as easy as I first thought.
Reading David Hobby's Strobist Lighting 102 series he lists the following 7 things you can do with light:
Vary it's position (or vary your subjects)
Change it's apparent size
Change its intensity
Restrict light
Refract and reflect
Change it's colour
Time - instantaneous or continuous
Whilst these are written from a strobists point of view, I see them as being equally valid for normal outdoor photography. Outdoors we know how hard the midday sun light is and that light at beginning or end of the day is less harsh with better graduation between light and dark and more subtle midtones.
I read somewhere that our eyes have a 10 stop optical range where as the best camera can only deal with about 5 stops. This means that landscapes with bright skies and dark foregrounds whilst perhaps looking spectacular to the eye often turn out in part over or underexposed. We can use graduated filters to squeeze the natural light down into a range the camera can handle and will look much closer to the real image than it would have unfiltered.
Whilst knowing all the rules, in the past that I have still taken light for granted. The more I take photographs the more I find myself searching for the right light to take them in. I think light is a key ingredient to that unanswerable question .... what makes a good photograph?
The above photograph was taken at dusk with a neutral density filter and a 10 second exposure.
Posted by Gordon at 14:01
Labels: Light
