Looking For Light

Looking For Light

by William Lulow

I love to write about light because it is the one constant to all types of photography. It is mostly about what kinds of effects you can get from light. The word “photograph” actually means “light picture,” so the importance of it is actually a given. When I taught my classes in studio lighting at New York’s NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH, I used to tell students that once they really understood studio lighting, they would never again look at a photograph or a scene for that matter, without noticing the lighting. It just becomes ingrained in photographers who have had the experience of working with light and who have developed a sense of what it can do.

Here’s a shot where the light comes mainly from one side:

It’s kind of easy to tell where the light is coming from because everything that doesn’t catch the light is dark and in the shadow. Here’s another example that we can find in nature:

Here the light is coming from camera right mostly and the aspen trees are reflecting it while the woods behind them remain dark and in the shadows. It’s an example of how highlights produced by natural light become the main attraction, same as the artificial light did in the teakettle shot above.

When you are shooting in a studio, you can control the light. You can aim it where you want and vary its intensity as well as the quality using various light modifiers. When you are making landscape photographs, you can take the same knowledge and awareness of what the studio light can do and apply it to scenes that you just see.

In this shot of a hiker in Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, look at all the bright areas. These “highlights” are signs of where the light is coming from and the difference in luminance between them and the darker areas (shadows) is what makes the image interesting. So, when you are out and about in the natural world and you can recognize what light is doing and how it makes you feel, you can then exercise some control over how it will affect your images by moving the camera position. Sometimes you can even add some artificial light to a scene to make it a bit more dramatic:

I made this image by actually popping up the camera’s built-in flash because there wasn’t enough light on the front of the leaves to show any of their detail and since they were moving a bit in the breeze, I had to use a higher shutter speed. The image was made with my Canon 60mm macro lens. The exposure was f/8 @1/250th of a second with an ISO of 800. The addition of the flash just brought out the leaves’ detail. This was a light I was looking for but it needed a bit of help to show that detail.

Any light that comes from the side of the subject is going to make textures and some detail more apparent. If you want to emphasize the texture in a scene, have the light come from the side. Here is another example:

Notice, in this example, how the light is shining on the water, is illuminating the wood on the bench and is reflected off the deep red color of the covered bridge. You can see all these elements if you train your eye to look for them.

Anything that is reflective or light colored in an image tends to stand out, whereas things that are darker tend to recede. So the interplay of highlights and shadows is what makes Black&White images so interesting. Color images always seem to dazzle us, but a crisp, well exposed and well lit B&W image can have the same effect, largely because we see color all the time, so a monochrome image seems different and maybe more dramatic.  Notice the various different shades of gray within the clouds themselves and the various parts of the image that pick up the light. That’s what makes the picture effective.

As you walk around your back yard even, get used to noticing certain types of light. You don’t even need to know what they are called at this point, just observe the light, sometimes without even taking any pictures. Then you will begin to see how light affects your images and you can look for it every time you go out shooting.