More About How We Learn

More About How We Learn

by William Lulow

Following up on my last two articles here, Lately, I have been teaching quite a few folks how to make good pictures, how to get good exposures every time and how really to get the most from their cameras. In this regard, I have been spending quite a bit of time thinking about how I learned it all back in the days of film. I think one of the first things I did was to do a lot of practice. Before I got any “formal” instruction in lighting or printmaking, I experimented on my own. I even went so far as to try to make color prints in my bathroom, before I even had a real darkroom. It was a “hit or miss” kind of experience, but one that taught me exactly what goes into learning any process.

I had an analogy that I used to use and it involved snow skiing and how to teach or learn it. If you were a rank beginner, never having been on skis before, and you signed up for a lesson from a ski instructor, the very terms she used might not mean anything to you unless you had previously tried it. “Snowplow,” “edges,” “turn,” – these might be terms you could understand from her explanation, but unless you tried it, you might not be able to see immediately, how it all worked. You would probably get the idea fairly quickly, but it would take some doing.

It’s much the same with learning photography. You really need to have a camera and have some experience getting things wrong before you can really absorb how to get things right. The number of experiments I made while attempting to learn both studio lighting and printmaking were truly remarkable. Thousands upon thousands of negatives were exposed and printed before I really began to get the idea of how best to control the entire process. I made every attempt to make sure all my exposures were consistent before embarking on an assignment. It most often involved a light meter to get an idea of what the main exposure should be. This was so that I could concentrate on getting expressions in portraits and details in my landscapes down to a science that I could rely on time and again. If exposures weren’t consistent, one would wind up often missing some great images because the negatives were not printable. We didn’t have computers and software that could rescue an image if it was two or three stops over or underexposed. Mistakes could be rectified by processing, if you knew what kinds of mistakes you made. But you had a much better chance of getting the shot you were after if all your exposures were correct. Here’s an example of a contact sheet where everything was correct:

Here you can see that with consistent exposures, you could really concentrate on expressions and attitude of your subject until you got what you wanted:

My 1975 portrait of famous bassist, Ron Carter for New York Magazine.

I was able to arrive at this result because I learned how to expose my negatives properly and in those days we often relied on making Polaroid prints just to check our exposures and make sure all of them were accurate. I learned this technique from working with other photographers before I opened my own business in 1980. In those days, they didn’t really have a good Polaroid film back for standard 35mm cameras (they developed one eventually), but there were good ones for both the medium format and large format cameras. Today, of course, we can simply look at our DSLR’s LCD screen to determine the accuracy of our exposures and it is something we all should be doing regularly.

So, we learn mostly by doing and experimentation until we have a good understanding of what we do and why. We also learn by watching other, more experienced practitioners and trying to emulate their methods. What happens next is a kind of synthesis of various techniques until they are refined enough to make them your own. I have done so many portraits over my 40+ year career that I have developed a kind of favorite recipe for doing them. It consists of adjusting my lighting so that the background has a gradient to it. Here’s an example:

Here you can see that the background is lighter on the bottom and darker on the top. I actually experimented with this kind of lighting on a black, no-seam paper background and noticed that if I put the light on the floor or near the floor, the bottom part, closer to the light, would naturally be lighter. I used this technique with various types of colored backgrounds and experimented with different colored gels to see what effect they would all have. Here are a couple more examples:

This shot was obtained by putting different colored gels over my background lights and aimed at a white paper background. I also had to experiment with how much gel to add to the lights. Sometimes one sheet wasn’t enough to render a certain color.

From this experimentation with background light, I found that in order to make the background a certain color or shade, it had to be lit. Placing a subject on a white background did NOT ensure that the background would reproduce as WHITE! Here’s an example of a subject shot on a white background with light provided by an on-camera flash:

The paper background in this shot, believe it or not was white! The light came from my portable flash unit mounted on the camera’s hotshoe, so it wasn’t able to go far enough behind the subject to light the background as well. It is actually obvious that this wouldn’t work and that the background would have to be lit separately, because light follows the inverse square law and its intensity varies with how close it is to the subject. So, if you want a white background, you have to put the light fairly close to it and light it evenly. My lighting for that consists of two lights, one on either side of the background and bounced into small umbrellas so that it is distributed evenly plus, of course, my big umbrella mainlight to produce this result:

In this shot you can actually see that the foreground received a bit less light than the background. This was a quick sort of set up, since it was my own granddaughter that I was just playing with, but often the foreground needs to be balanced with the background if you need to do a full-length portrait like this:

Here, the background and foreground were evenly balanced to create the effect that the subject was “floating” on white. Here is another example where the background and foreground lighting had to be balanced:

The lights in this shot were just props. The background was lit with two umbrellas on each side (in tandem) and the subjects were lit with my large umbrella and a softbox on each side aimed at the floor.

The point to all this is that we learn most by paying attention to results and internalizing what we learn each time. One can then build the skills necessary to achieve some of the effects here. But it takes an exceptional amount of practice. That is always the key to achieving real mastery over anything you attempt to learn.