The Source of Light

Sometimes I see photos with a particular type of lighting I just don’t like, and it took me awhile to figure out why, especially when some are technically sound, by very accomplished photographers.

I think my issue is, I like the light to have, or at least feel like it has, a logical, or organic source.

So I kept this in mind while flipping through some websites, and came up with a few examples:

Here, the interior location combined with the angle of the light implies a widow stage left. Whether or not there’s actually a window there, it LOOKS like the light’s coming from one. (photo from Fashion Gone Rogue)

Now here, the brightest part of the natural scene is at the subject's back, yet the strongest light is coming from somewhere in front of him. This is from Zack Arias’s site, and he knows his lighting, but for my taste, the confusion about what is actually generating the light takes me out of the photo. It just doesn’t make enough sense to me. (photo from Zack Arias’s site)

And finally, I think the chandeliers (the “practicals”) here imply a light source that in reality wouldn’t be able to light the model nearly as much as she is, but it’s enough to satisfy my needs for a logical source of light. (photo from Fashion Gone Rogue

So that’s my personal, quirky preference. I know it’s neither right nor wrong, but it’s nice to at least have gotten to something of a theory about the kind of lighting I like—for now.

Symphony of Trends

There’s no one dominant trend today, but instead there are many simultaneous trends, each evolving and ebbing and flowing alongside each other, or even isolated from one another. There’s less and less of what’s in and what’s out, and much more playing together in symphony.

The Color of Light

In representational painting, one of the first things you have to learn is that a white object is never actually white. It always takes on some of the color of the light that hits it and reflects back to the viewer’s eye.

Seems simple enough, but the brain jumps through many hoops to disregard this color information, probably to make life easier for us all. The brain’s so good at this that the only way I know of to see a “white” object’s (or any object’s) true color is by looking through a little hole punched in the middle of a neutral gray card aimed at the object. Painters sometimes use these, and the first time I tried it I was blown away by all the different colors “white” objects actually are.

Most of the time, not noticing or even knowing about all this just makes life less complicated, especially when there are many more important things to worry about. But good photographs are not about most of the time. They’re about the drama, the serenity, the infinite emotions light evokes.

Yet unfortunately, light’s sublime nature is often unthinkingly denuded out of a photograph with the white balance tools without asking why first.

Sure, sometimes it’s necessary. A white shirt in a catalog should probably look as white as possible. And when the light—especially artificial light--hitting an object or person is ugly and only makes things worse, getting rid of it with white balance can save something of the photo.

But it’s never necessary to do so out of laziness or habit or in appeasement of the left brain’s demand for whites to be white. If photography is about light, photographers need to do better than that.

Near my house there’s a white stucco wall that, in the summer, gets both blue light from the sky and reddish light from clouds lit by a setting sun. This mixture creates the most beautiful, ethereal magenta I’ve ever seen. It only lasts a few moments, and I’ve never been able to capture it fully with a photograph, but I can keep trying.

Color photography is about the infinite and fleeting flavors of light, and not about the plain vanilla of white balance. Embrace the color of light, like Riccardo Bernardi does here for Schön! Magazine

Twilight of the Single Great Photograph

Back in day, a single photograph could rise to fame and fortune all by itself. Steve McCurry’s Afghan girl, Eisenstaedt’s “VJ Day in Times Square,” Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima flag raising—all these and many more stand supreme and alone in time and memory.

Those days, though, are mostly over. We all see far too many images—both still and moving—for any one of them to stand out so brilliantly. And perhaps those images we hold as iconic never really stood by themselves as much as we think anyway.

To comprehend the VJ day couple kissing in Times Square as special, the viewer would have to know what VJ day meant, would have to know about the years of war that preceeded it. Otherwise, there’s nothing extra remarkable about it. Everything needs context.

But context and story can be conjured for just about any subject matter with a series of images carefully arranged with the eye of a film editor. A wide shot in an REI catalog showing the hard weather, followed by a close up to show determination. A view of the Dharavi area of Mumbai contrasted with portraits of people working and creating there.

It doesn’t always take much, but the context has to be there rather than assumed.

Probably a lot of photographers think this way subconsciously, the result of exposure to so much media growing up.

But however this shift away from the single image arrived, we’re all film editors and cinematographers now—even when working with still images.