In the Language of Light concept, Available Light is everything; it is our day light, our night light, our sunrises and sunsets – without some light there are no photographs. No rocket science here so far.
I believe something that allows accomplished photographers to stand out is their understanding of a few definite properties of light and subjects, and of course, the technical knowledge of how to deal with them.
Photography is a pursuit of transferable skills. In 2003, when I got serious enough about photography to consider making it a profession (that took another 8 years!) – bird photography was my passion, but I was probably a generalist. I took as much pleasure from stalking a colourful bird in the rain forests of Malaysia, as I did taking architectural images of the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur.
Slowly, over the years I began to specialise more and more, and now, although I still take images of architecture, culture and birds, it is landscapes that inspire me the most and motivate me to grow my database of knowledge, experience and tools that allow me to be expressive about what I spend my life doing.
But the principles of exposure that I learned in the dark forests of the tropics are more or less the same as when I am shooting landscapes. The ideas I had then about composition and subjects allowed me to create a langscape style that I felt represented what I had to say about my surroundings. Let’s face it, shooting a bird, is much the same as shooting a wedding portrait.
The Language of Light principle is this – use your images to articulate to others the messages you intend, based on your interaction and experiences with the subjects of those images.
Photography is a fine balancing act between Art & Craft, Vision and Technique and it takes time to develop these skills, both the ability to “see” and to express that vision in a communicative manner through an image.
In the Seeing the Unseen eBook I repeatedly discuss the very concept that gave the book its name – visualising things that are not actually there and how they will interact with the final composition. Of course this takes time, but a counterpoint learning point is to see things that are there, but perhaps need a bit more “looking” to appreciate them.
As most of us know, our cameras do not always reproduce the scene we are capturing as we experience it. Regardless of how sophisticated or expensive our tools, often we have color casts or lack of contrast. Often, we are actually responsible for the adding the color casts, for example if we use graduated Neutral Density Filters – only the most expensive are truly neutral, the rest tend to add a magenta color cast. Other examples are Blue/Gold Polarizers, or Big Stopper 10 stop ND filters.
Natural Color Casts happen in twilight, sunrise and sunset or at night, when in camera white balance can get thrown off quite badly, especially in mixed lighting conditions.
Of course, some of these color casts at sunrise or sunset make our images look fantastic, the brilliant warm colors are so appealing, but are they authentic?
Until a camera comes along that is capable of recording naturally occurring dynamic range as our eyes see it, photography is a compromise or at best a technical challenge.
HDR, or Hight Dynamic Range images have become a cliche of contrast, wild tone and unrealistic representations of what we were seeing. Having said that, there are some who manage to create some excellent images using the available tools.
My goal is to create images with realistic contrast and dynamic range, but using a manual blending method rather than expecting a software algorithm to make the perfect choices for me. In Blending Case Study 1, we took a very simple example of an image where the transition between the sky and the foreground was a straight line, a simple gradient across the two layers created the desired effect.
