Light Extracts

“Why not start, for example, with bright sunlight and then work through the times of day, then move on to different amounts of cloudiness?”

“The big difference, It seems to me, is between lighting you can reasonably plan for, and lighting that’s unexpected. All of the lighting in this book is of the kind that’s handed to you by the place and the time. You could call it ‘found’ lighting – most of it natural daylight.”

“A very basic idea is the attractiveness of lighting, and why some kinds are more desirable than others to most photographers.”

“Think for a moment about what photographers and film makers call the Golden hour. The ‘hour’ is just approximate, but it means when the sun is low and bright, and it has its well-known name because so many of us favour it and plan for it.”

“Although I don’t have any ambitions to add more jargon to photography than there already is. The lighting for any shot has a beauty coefficient, or you could call it a likeability factor. The Golden Hour, for example, would score overall about 8 out of 10 on this, and a flat grey sky would come in at around 1 or 2.”

“What’s useful about such a beauty coefficient, however, is that it expresses what most people like. Deep down, it’s conventional, and that’s why there are many occasions when you might instead want to be different.”

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“In Praise of Shadows, a slim volume written in 1933 by a Japanese novelist, Jun’ichiro Tanizaki.”

“He was giving the counterview to Western Modernism, with its Bauhaus-bright emphasis on flooding life with light and whiteness, with all the associations of progress and optimism. Actually, Tanazaki railed against all of this, writing in a sympathetic but melancholy way of the beauty and even colour in darkness.”

“Lacquerware decorated in gold was made to be seen in the dark.”

“Most people simply take it for granted. In this, it shares a common difficulty with other sensory experiences, like taste and smell. There is a professional vocabulary, although it is by no means as evolved as the two big sensory industries – wine and perfume.”

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“Practically, as a photographer, I divide light into the kinds I can expect, and the kinds that take me by surprise.”

“It also depends on having a feeling for what the light does to landscape, people, and buildings. This includes the more technical matters of contrast: where the shadows fall and how strong they are, how well or not the light separates a subject from its background, and how clearly it explains the shape and form of things. But it also goes further, into the realm of sensation and atmosphere, which are less easy to pin down, but nevertheless powerful components of a photograph.”

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“Time of day meets weather to create these many lighting situations, and behind them lay location and climate.”

“There are, in fact, relatively few professions and trades that live by the sun; photography happens to be one of them.”

“Personally, I use a phone app called Helios, which was designed for a cinematographers, and has everything from a clinometer to a shadow-length calculator.”

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Soft Sunlight

“There’s a reasonable amount of contrast that gives form and shape to things, but the gentleness in the atmosphere keeps the shadows open, their edges softened and the whole scene rounded rather than harsh.”

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Gray Light

“Poor grey light, few people seem to want it. It’s too ordinary, an all-too-predictable condition in mid-latitudes, often persisting day after day to the irritation of people who know that just above that low layer of shapeless cloud (low-level stratus is the culprit), a warm bright sun is shining.”

“The word ‘mood’ crops up frequently when photographers talk about light, and how it contributes. A full range of moods includes more than elation, the sublime, and surprise. There are many occasions for moods that are more reflective, quieter, even melancholy. I learned much about this in the few years I spent shooting in Japan, where restraint in many things conveys a kind of pleasure.”

“It demands, perhaps, a more rigorous approach to composition, especially with placing subjects against backgrounds that contrast because of their natural tones and colors.”

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“Another thing you may have noticed from these and the pictures on the previous pages is that I’ve been careful to frame the shots without any sky. Most skies on grey days have no features, and more than that, they are usually much brighter than the land.”

“The interesting thing here is that if you take a range of colours all from the same group - the same sector of the colour circle - they appear at their best saturation when the lighting is even and gentle, not bright and contrasty. This seems counterintuitive, but it’s because flat light does away with bright highlights and sharp, dark shadows, neither of which have much colour at all.”

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Soft Gray Light

“Here are the opening lines from a series of poems written by Ouyan Xiu in the eleventh century.”

“A light boat with short oars – West Lake is good.

A gentle curve in the green water

Deep in spring, the rain’s passed – West Lake is good.

A hundred gasses vie in beauty

Who can explain why we love it – West Lake is good.

The beautiful scene is without time.”

“Fine mist on distant water, one white egret flying from the Immortal Isle

Misty mountains shrouded the rain

In the shade of the green willows

The water’s surface has just smoothed,

The foot of the cloud low

The blur of colour across the hills is richer still in rain.”

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Wet Gray Light

“If grey lights suits green plant life, vegetation positively basks in rain.”

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“But the ground of the temple were laden with a soft, damp atmosphere that seemed to dampen sounds.”

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“Most stones look their best when wet, and this one certainly deserved special treatment.”

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Hard Light Graphic Geometry

“After grey light, the most commonly rejected and unloved is the hard-edged light from a high sun.”

“Here we’re back to a likeability, and the attractiveness index of hard light is rated low by most photographers – hence its name, and the common refrain, ‘the light’s too hard.’”

“Geometrical abstraction is arguably what hard light does best, and it’s no coincidence that my example here is a Los Angeles house by the renowned architect Ricardo Legorreta, not the first or last Mexican architect to design specifically for the cloudless skies of southern California and northern Mexico. Everything here is a straight0line sculptural and hard-edged, and specifically created to be overlaid with shadows and enhanced by contrast.”

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Hard Light The Case for Black & White

“The first of these two reasons is that black and white is, if not exactly immune to the time of day, much less restricted by it than colour photography.”

“Probably the strongest component of these two very popular times of day is their colour, and because so many photographers prize these end – of – the – day hues, by comparison midday tends to be ignored.”

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Hard Light Stark City Contrast

“As we just saw, one of the many things that lighting can do is to help evoke the physical sensation of a place and a time.”

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Hard Light Nubian Desert

“But deserts definitely look hotter and emptier – more desert-like to my mind – under flat, high, midday light like this.”

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Hard Light High-Altitude Blue

“What makes the Tibetan plateau here so special is exactly this hardness of light, which you can find only at altitude.”

“But at least it can preserve the lunar quality of the sunlight”

“All this blue is a reminder of the very high UV content of the light, or rather the failure of the thin atmosphere to block it. How you deal with it is a matter of preference. You could simply go for it and use the blues, or make it more realistic by fitting a strong UV filter and/or/taking some of the blue out in processing. Yet another approach is to use a polarizing filter to push the already-deep blue sky into an even deeper violet. High altitude encourages exaggerations, which is no bad thing.”

“The darkening effect of a polarizing filter on a blue sky is strongest at right angles to the sun, and at these altitudes, is stronger than usual.”

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Raking Light Facades

“Light can also be a collaboration between the sun and the surface, and the idea of raking light is when the source is sharp and pinpoint (like the sun on a clear day) and a glancing across a surface that has some kind of delicate relief.”

“Religious buildings, like the cathedral on the left, are often aligned to the cardinal points, which naturally means that one of the sides tends to be side-on to the early and late sun.”

“Raking light does two important things to a wall like this – and to that of the old Mexican mansion in Mérida also (right). It reveals texture”

“The atmosphere was slightly hazy with the result that the shadows weaken as the sun approaches the horizon. Only on crystal clear days do they stay sharp and solid until the end.”

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Raking Light Perfect for Bas-reliefs

“Angkor in Cambodia”

“Persepolis in Iran”

“The Persian bas-relief starts to come alive in the late afternoon, particularly in winter, as the entire complex is aligned northwest-southeast, so that with the sun setting northwest, this southwest-facing wall catches the grazing light.”

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Raking Light Sharpening the Landscape

“Then of course, there’s raking light bathing the entire landscape.”

“Nearer the Arctic and Antarctic, on the other hand, the time for this light spreads out across the day.”

“In common with the other, smaller-scale raking light situations, it depends not just on the sun being low, but also on there being really clear air. As the sun gets lower, its light has to pass through much more atmosphere than when it is shining straight down onto the land, and this acts like a softening filter. On top of this, haze and pollution tend to hug the ground, so that those last few degrees of the sun above the horizon often I could say usually see a rapid softening of shadow edges.”

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Tropical Harsh Midday on Lake Inle

“Low latitudes, around the equator and into the tropics, take the sun even higher in the middle of the days, which means that if you insist on going for traditionally ‘pretty; each time you shoot, your working hours are going to be quite limited.”

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“This kind of dappling is technically chiaroscuro, which I go into in more detail on pages 132-135”

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Snow Light The Ultimate Reflector

“The tropical light we just saw is a kind of environmental light, depending very much on place.”

“There are a number of things you can do with it, and one of my favourites is to use it as a kind of white canvas background for things happening in the snow.”

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Into The Light Reflections & Refractions

“Here, to introduce the theme, are two of the classic evocative effects of shooting toward the sun: reflections off of surfaces and refractions through something. The reason why they are in important part of this kind of shooting is that they bring the sun actually into the scene, rather than having it just sitting above and behind.”

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Into the Light Into the Sun

“None of this is any reason to avoid shooting into the sun, but be aware that the processing will take longer. This banding reduces if you reduces the exposure with the Raw converter’s slider; also, the Raw converter’s highlight-recovery slider will help. It may even be necessary to make two versions from the Raw converter and blend them later. Finally, using Replace Colour in Photoshop after Raw conversion allows you to target ‘bands’ and change their hue (yellow tending to green is common), saturation and lightness. An alternative if you have the camera locked down is to shoot a range of exposures and make an HDR image file. See pages 242-247 for more on this.”

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Into the Light blocking the sun

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Shade To Light Looking Out & Beyond

“Added to this is some psychology, because in an image like this one, not only is the viewer firmly placed within the scene, looking out, but there is a sense of the outside sunlit scene being somehow positive and attractive.”

“This effect of pulling the eye out towards the distance, almost despite itself and working both visually and psychologically, was used in painting well before photography hit upon it. I’ve mentioned this before, in the photography hit upon it. I’ve mentioned this before, in The Photographer’s Mind, but it’s worth re-visiting. The hugely influential Claude Lorrain, the great seventeenth-century landscapes as subjects in their own right, devised a way of constructing a composition that led the eye very precisely.”

“A dark, shadowed foreground, weighted and partly framed to one side with trees, like the wings of a theatre. On the other side and a little beyond, another framing mass, not quite as dark, but still like a theatre wing, so that the scene becomes a kind of stage set. Beyond, the landscape receding to the horizon becomes lighter and lighter, and the sky lighter still, because the view is into the sun. This structure and lighting takes the eye from the foreground on one side across and beyond to the middle ground, and then toward the luminous distance and sky in the centre and slightly above. The image has structure, and leads the eye. Later painters copied these ideas, not least another great landscape painter, J.M.W.  Turner, as the illustrations show,”

“They created a pool of light within the foreground-to-middle ground. Two great examples are Lorrain’s ‘Rest on the Flight into Egypt,’ painted in 1644 (his ‘Moses Saved from the Waters,’ 1639 is startlingly similar) and Turner’s ‘Crossing the Brook’ from 1815. The human eye is naturally drawn to figures and faces, so this mini scene draws the attention before it goes off into the distance.”

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Reflection Light Mirror Smooth

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Reflection Light a Broad Wash

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Reflection Light

“As in all these reflection shots on these pages, there has to be something in the water or on the ice, but the object is often a device to show off the lighting, and the two of them – object and light – lighting, and two of them – object and light – usually share the billing in this kind of image.”

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Reflection Light Projected Ripples

“Both of these examples happen to be from Japan, and both from the same book assignment on contemporary Japanese design, but that’s a coincidence. The conditions are special, and there are two ways in which this lighting effect happens. The more obvious is when you have a translucent screen, which could be a ground glass pane, but here happened to be the perfect material for projection – a shoji screen made of hand-laid Japanese paper stretched across a light Wooden frame.”

“This particular situation was unusual, compromising a shallow trough of an interior pond, open at one end to the sky and facing easy, with sculpted glass blocks in the form of large stones in the centre. Shortly after sunrise, the light refracted exquisitely through the glass onto the wall, which itself had a sheet of water falling down over it. All precisely calculated by the architect, the famous Kengo Kuma.”

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Backlight Translucent Windows

“However, as the glass was sandblasted, it did not spread the backlight evenly, as the individual exposures show, and to achieve this totally even effect I had to shoot different exposures and blend them together.”

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Backlight The Silhouette

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Axial Light Low Sun Telephoto

“To begin with, axial light is shadowless but at the same time intense, which comes across as unexpected.”

“Axial sunlight: with the sun behind the camera, everything is lit, with just a light surrounding shadow to deep or rounded objects.”

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Axial Light Open Doorway

“At the risk of straying from photography, I want to show next to it a painting by one of China’s leading artist. Shao Fan, who is also a friend. In this period of his work, Shao Fan is returning to some older principles of Chinese art, in particular to the idea of showing form without the help of light, and this is one of the key differences between the Chinese and Western art traditions. To me (my words, not Shao Fan’s), there does seem to be a virtual light source in this and other paintings of his. The darkening at the edges of the hourse make the light seem to come straight from the viewer.”

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Axial Light Ship’s Hold

“One of the qualities that I personally get from axial light is a sense of almost dissecting the subject. With everything lit, no corners concealed and no shadows, I don’t think it’s too fanciful to say that it’s a kind of forensic view. Going back for a moment to the ring-flash effect I mentioned on the previous pages, that specialized kind of photographic lighting that fits around the front of the lens was actually first designed for medical photography.”

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Skylight blue Shade

“Ever since colour photography became possible, photographers have had to worry about colour temperature (or what now gets called white balance), and more than anything, about the dangers of a blue cast from open shade on a clear sunny day.”

“Most of the light, in the region of 85%, comes from the sun, but some also comes from the rest of the sky, a large area reflecting sunlight, it reflecting only the blue wavelengths. For the technically curious, this is called diffuse sky radiation, and appears blue because normal atmospheric particles are smaller than the wavelength of sunlight and scatter the shortest wavelengths, which happen to be blue. Anywhere shaded from the sun is lit by this blue light. Plus a little bouncing up from the ground or from walls.”

“Skylight Colour Balance: Although the light intensities are very different, you can choose from the camera settings or in a Raw processing how to balance the colour. At the ends of the scales, neutralizing the sunlight renders the skylight blue, while neutralizing the skylight makes sunlit areas appear yellowish.”

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Skylight Portrait Standard

“Skylight set-up for a portrait: An effective way to use skylight for a portrait is to sit the subject just in shade, to allow bounced light from the ground to open up the shot, and even, in the case of the black-and-white portrait here, hint at some patches of sunlight.”

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Top Light Deep Forest

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Window Light Directional with Soft Shadows

“Long before soft boxes were invented to make flash light gentler, in the professional world there were shaped aluminium boxes that were heavier and bulkier and did the same thing. Fronted by translucent acrylic, they became popular in the 1960s and 1970s in studios, particularly for advertising still-life shoots. They were known not only as ‘banks’ but also as ‘window lights, ‘because that was the light they mimicked – a rectangular white light source positioned close.”

“Precisely because of the wonderful modelling qualities of north-facing windows. Go back further in the history of imaging, and north-facing skylights were preferred for painter’s studios. The reason for facing north was, and is, that at no point does the sun shine directly through like a spotlight and change the nature of the lighting. Instead, the window acts as a large rectangular bank of light, and creates a very special and attractive balance between modelling and softness. What this exactly means is that the light is directional, so that it casts shadows and rounds out forms, but at the same time, the shadows have soft edges and retain some detail. Many painters, particularly the Dutch, with their affinity for northern cool light, loved this effect, and Johannes Vermeer’s ‘The Milkmaid’ is just one example. Both of the photographs here, from the same project on the shakers, make full use of natural window light. With no need for any shadow fill. In the picture of the milk bucket, the camera angle is deliberately half toward the window, which increases the contrast and makes more of the highlighting on the beautifully curved wood. The nuances of camera angle to the window are important with this lighting.”

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Window Light Classic Fall-off

“This in turn means that something called the Inverse Square Law comes into play much more noticeably. This is simply one of the laws of physics that applies when you have force or energy radiating outward, and it means that the intensity of light, for instance, doesn’t just weaken with distance, but it weakens with the square of the distance.”

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Window Light Streaming Sunlight

“When direct sunlight does stream in through the window, the results can be almost magical, although uncontrollable.”

“As it rarely lasts long and poses some exposure issues because of the very high contrast.”

“There is a built-in attractiveness to this kind of lighting because it usually occurs in or approaching Golden Hour, which we’ll be looking at next. This is all to do with angle, because for sunlight to have any real reach into most rooms through a normal window, the sun needs to be fairly low, meaning lower than about 40o.”

“For interior photography, the appeal of this short-lived lighting is that it shows the room off in an unusual and special way. Both of these shots would have been that much more predictable and a little duller if they had been taken in more usual daylight.”

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Window Light Narrow Window, Dark Space

“Small windows in dark rooms (the two go together, naturally) are a thing of the past, generally. Quite simply, in contemporary living, windows are getting bigger, because there is an almost universal desire for bright interiors. However, going back to the Japanese writer Jun ‘ichiro Tanizaki, mentioned in the introduction, white and bright Modernism may have taken over most of the world of contemporary interiors, but in photography, hidden things, only partly revealed, go a long way toward making an interesting image. So, in praise of the shadow world, let’s look at under-lit interiors, where light leaks in through very small spaces. We’re more likely to find this happening in an ancient style of dwelling, and it’s no coincidence that two of my best examples of this are from minority communities, building in wood and bamboo.”

“This kind of image tends to be ruined by overexposure, whereas the surroundings can go as black as anything.”

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Window Light Managing Several Windows

Shine reflection colour show

“Not many rooms or buildings have a number of windows opening out in different directions; as we just saw, the most typical arrangement is one or two windows in one wall, so that the light comes from a single direction, with the inevitable fall-off that is more extreme than the eye imagines.”

“All I wanted from this particular shot was to show in detail the teak pillars, painted black with stencilled gold decoration.”

“The shiny surface of the pillar needed lighting care, and we lit this nearest one with two windows from the left as a main light.”

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Golden Hour Basking in Warmth

“Golden Hour is excellent for photography, no doubt about it, but the more you gear your efforts toward it, the less special it becomes little by little, just a thought.”

“How long does it last? That depends on the path of the sun, according to the latitude and the season. The equator is the simplest: At either solstice, June or December, the sun rises at 06:00 and sets at 18:00 in the middle of the time zone, and it takes 90 minutes to reach 20o from sunrise, and the same time from 20o to sunset. In the mid-latitudes there’s much more variation throughout the year. In Washington, DC in midsummer it takes just under 60 minutes to reach 20o, and in winter 150 minutes. In Stockholm it takes 200 minutes in midsummer, but in midwinter it gets no higher than 7o, lasting all day (what there is of it).

“The colour is warm, and people generally like that, possibly because it reminds them atavistically of fire (that could be a bit far-fetched). The angle is low, which basically means that in any one spot you have three possibilities with distinctly different light situations: side-lighting, into the sun, and with the sun behind you.”

“Golden hour equals height of sun: Because the height of the sun during the day determines its color and angle, Golden Hour lasts longer in a mid-latitude winter (lower track) than summer (upper).”

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Golden Hour Three-point Lighting

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Golden Hour Facing into Soft Golden Light

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Golden Hour Last Moments

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Magic Hour Burmese Days

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Magic Hour Magic Colours

“The reason why this special time of the day has its name is, as Nestor Almendros put it, “It gave some kind of magic look, a beauty and romanticism.”

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Magic Hour Subtle Oppositions

“As the Tate Gallery in London explains, ‘Many British artists, especially those under the influence of Pre-Raphaelitism, looked carefully at the cultured shadows of dawn and dusk. These effects were most striking of all in the desert, which often appears not as dangerous, but as beautiful wilderness containing places resonant with the ebb and flow of civilizations.”

“Opposed Colours: From top to bottom, the opposing sky colours at different times and in different conditions: a clear rich sunset, about 20 minutes into a typical Magic Hour, and the Nile scene shown here, at the beginning of Magic Hour.”

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Magic Hour First & Last Light Silhouettes

“To get technical about it, the entire Magic hour is twilight, which simply means light coming from the atmosphere without direct sun.”

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Blue Evenings Remains of the Day

“Nevertheless, this is special and highly desirable lighting, particularly on professional assignments that demand richly attractive exterior scenes that include additional lighting. This is a typical example, familiar to all photographers who shoot resorts and luxury hotels and who need to ramp up the desirability of the location.”

“For safety I allow it just 10minutes.”

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Blue Evenings The 10-minute Window

“As often is the case, the architect and designers here at the brilliant Resort in Yangzonghai, China, have arranged the lighting for just this effect, in particular the concealed lights under the seating in the sunken islands, and the underwater floods. This late evening combination of light has the extra advantage, fortunately not needed here, of reducing unwanted things that would be glaringly obvious in daylight.”

“Large blue-violet against small yellow-orange.”

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Blue Evenings an Architectural Choice

“It’s worth mentioning that the colour relationship between large blue and small orange is a happy coincidence, because the human vision system is conditioned to ‘see’ complementary colours as naturally satisfying. To be strictly accurate, across the colour circle the matching hues are blue tending toward violet together with a yellowish orange. It was the German philosopher, poet, and general polymath J.W. Goethe who in 1810 came up with this theory, and more than this, suggested that opposing colours complement each other best when their brightness is taken into account. Violet, for example, is the darkest colour, and yellow the lightest, so they combine in a natural way to the eye when the yellow takes up much less space than the violet. Incidentally, there is no light violet, Justas there is no dark yellow. We call them by different names instead – such as mauve and ochre. Buildings in blue evening light showcase all of this perfectly. In this case, I was shooting one of architect I.M. Pei’s last projects, the new Suzhou Museum, both for my own book and for the architect’s, so I had instructions to follow. The design referenced a traditional Suzhou style of white geometric shapes edged with grey, and with these strong graphic qualities, the building photographed well in sunlight also.”

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City Light Street Lights

“On the other hand, as a colour display in its own right, street lighting has a lot to offer. The colours are: long-spectrum orange from old-fashioned tungsten (increasingly rare in street lighting); un-correctable narrow-spectrum yellow-orange from sodium; blue-green (usually) from fluorescent; blue-to-white from mercury vapour; and a similarly blue-tinted light from metal halide.”

“The camera assumes a basic 5000k to 5500k setting but if the street scene contains at least a couple of these difference sources, as in the Sharjah picture, this basically neutral setting shows these color differences. And working on the colour balance of each of these kinds of lamp has varied success. Tungsten light, because it is incandescent and comes from burning, has a continuous spectrum over its range, and so processes well in the sense that it has a ‘rounded’ appearance. At the other end of the scale, sodium lighting is sharp-cut and narrow, and simply does not embrace any other wavelengths beyond a narrow spike at just over 589nm. It is essentially monochromatic; there are no other colours to pull in.”

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Candle Light Spheres of Illumination

“I mentioned the book in Praise of Shadows by the early twentieth 0 century Japanese writer Jun ‘ichiro Tanizaki, and it’s time to return to it here. Among other things, in it he praised the effect of a flickering candle flame as its light passed over half-seen surfaces such as gilt lacquer.”

“When Stanley Kubrick made Barry Lyndon in 1975, he went to his usual meticulous lengths to research not just the period, the eighteenth century, but also its imagery. One of the effects he wanted to capture was the pre-electric experience of nighttime interiors (shades of Tanizaki!), something we rarely experience now. For key scenes, set in a castle at night (a card game and a conversation over dinner), he was determined to film entirely by the light of candles, to give the feeling of the period.”

“Kubrick bought and had modified a Zeiss 50mm Planar lens with the exceptional aperture of f/0.7.”

“The faster the lens, the more beautiful the effect, because only the face – sometimes only an eye – needs to be sharply focused. The range of brightness between face and flame is considerable, but always go for the face. The flame will tolerate more overexposure than you might think, not least because it is always small relative to the scene, there are no guides for this kind of exposure, but fortunately testing and previewing on the camera’s LCD screen is a perfectly workable method.”

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Glowing Light Things Burning

“This kind of glowing light actually has dimension. We’re no longer dealing with a point source of light, but something that is pretty much the subject itself. Any photograph that includes the light source is automatically going to be outside the range of a sensor.”

“A slight addition of pale yellow to the centre makes it more natural.”

“Colour Temperature: Strictly speaking, colour temperature applies to light source that burn. From a wooden building burning through an oxy-acetylene torch to sunlight, the hotter the burning, the higher (less orange) the colour temperature.”

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Chasing

“Trent Parke, for example, defines his work this way (‘I am forever chasing light’)”

“Or, as Parke continues, ‘light turns the ordinary into the magical.”

“There is a borderland between Waiting and Chasing that’s a little porous, an occasionally grey area where the two different approaches merge. One practical reason is that if you live where you are shooting, then not only do you have more familiarity with the way light works throughout the day and the seasons, but you can indeed wait for an uncommon lighting condition it’s just that you have to wait longer or with less predictability. Things are very different, though, if you are traveling or just passing through on a schedule that discourages changes. And more than that, light that may seem special in one part of the world can be more common in another. So, a few of the lighting types mentioned here could possibly have been treated in the first section, Waiting. But if you find yourself thinking that any of these types of lighting is easy, a useful antidote is to go out and try to find them. This is almost universally light that you train and prepare for rather than order off the menu.”

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Golden Hour First moments

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Edge Light Elusive & Special

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Chiaroscuro The Play of Light & Shadow

“Chiaroscuro (Italian for light-dark) is the art term that has carried over probably the most effectively from painting to photography.”

“It basically means using the contrast between light and shade to create a sense of three dimensional modelling”

“It might seem strange to give a name to something so obvious, but that’s only because we are so thoroughly accustomed to seeing pictures of scenes, in any form, which clearly have light falling on them.”

“Chiaroscuro really got going in the sixteenth century, and gradually became a major feature of composition and entire sense of the image. The Italian painter Caravaggio made his name with chiaroscuro, and it was taken up by the Flemish. Rembrandt in particular used it powerfully. As this happened, the word came to be used not just for light and shade, which became taken for granted, but also for an exaggerated use of it.”

“This is where we are now, light and shade used strongly and to the point where they is a main part of the image, and even sometimes takes over.”

“Rembrandt’s St Peter in Prison, 1631: A classically powerful chiaroscuro that both spotlights part of the subject while leaving part shadowed to blend with the dark background. The spill of light at lower right, pointedly focused by the keys, is important to the effect.”

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Chiaroscuro Dividing and Abstracting

“I’ve chosen this one, of an Iban farmer asleep in a longhouse deep in a Sarawak forest, because it illustrates quite well one of the qualities of chiaroscuro as the word is used today – how it tends to abstract the image.”

“If it had been shot on digital, there would have been a processing choice that would have varied from more detail visible in the highlights to opening up the shadows. In fact, you could have both. Would this have been a temptation, to make the image more immediately understandable? For me it wouldn’t. Explaining everything does not necessarily make for a better photograph, and in this instance the picture would have been more about what was happening in the scene, and frankly I doubt there was enough of interest to sustain more detail. Better I think, to make this an image about light and shade.”

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Spotlight Focusing Attention

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“Spotlighting becomes even more vital and effective when there is action in the frame, or passing through it. There’s a sense, and it’s completely valid, that a brief moment has been caught, rather than, as in the spotlights on the previous pages, a fairly static scene just found. Action in photography, and especially good moments, has added value in most viewers’ eyes. This is not only what photography is good at, it is what only photography can do – capture one slice of an action and preserve it forever. Say what you like about beautiful scenery and an artful still-lie arrangement, there is something uniquely satisfying about a well-caught moment, and to have it spotlit, all the more so.”

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Spot Backlight light Against Dark

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Light Shafts Cavers & Cathedrals

“A beam of light, carving its way visibly through the atmosphere, has always been the most melodramatic kind of lighting, from painting (used for example by Caspar David Friedrich) to movies and still images. Not for nothing is this known as the Finger of God – especially when it pours from the clouds and strikes a subject on the ground.”

“The conditions are similar to what’s needed for an ordinary spotlight effect, an opening of some kind to limit the sunlight to a beam, plus an atmosphere thick enough to make the beam visible.”

“A Higher sun: Light shafts need large and high spaces to show themselves, and this inevitably means that they appear when the sun is high.”

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Barred Light Spotlights with Shape

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Patterned Light Foliage

“In fact, this is a classic example of light as subject. The overlay of patterned light is every bit as much an element in the image as the section of painting and the chair.”

“One makes a good, simple book cover, with space for type; the other makes an atmospheric image.”

“Controlling the strength of the pattern: With digital processing, this kind of overlaid pattern can be managed to a high degree. These four variations, from weak to intense, were made with the controls in Adobe Camera Raw, as follows.

1 lowest contrasting setting, Highlights slightly reduced, Shadows raise.

2 Default settings, but converted to black and white as all the others, using default settings.

3 Highest contrast setting, Blacks raised slightly to avoid clipping.

4 As the high-contrast version, with clarity raised to +50 and blacks raised slightly more to avoid clipping.”

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Patterned Light Windows & Blinds

Liquid Light

Still-life Details

Light out of Shade

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Cast-Shadow Light Projected Shapes

Shade out of Light

Shadow As Subject

Planning

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Storm Light Brief Spotlight

“This is the king of fleeting light that breaks through during a storm – or at least, during particularly heavy and cloudy weather.”

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Storm Light From Under the Cloud Bank

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Storm Light Dark-Cloud Backdrop

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Storm Light Cities at Night

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Rain Light Shower in a Sculpture Park

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Caustics Burning Patterns

“These complex and intense curves and intersections of light are called caustics, after the Greek word for brunt – highly concentrated light, as through a focused magnifying glass, can burn, after all.”

“The way the refractions fall, and on what kind of surface, makes them unpredictable for exposure, and having a selection of different exposures to choose from for processing is worthwhile.”

“Caustics as a deliberate lighting effect: Part of a shoot for a grand old Swiss hotel involved the embossed letterhead, and a simple glass of water was turned into a kind of colour-fringed spotlight to add interest.”

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Sunstars Sun in View & Under Control

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Sunstars an Afternoon on Mount Tam

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Flared Light Expressive Faults

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White Light Peach Blossom Scroll Painting

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White Light Interpreting the Light

“Processing Whiter: The difference between the two versions of this interior scene lie in the processing, which below is compressed into the right half of the range – with the deliberate exception of the dark cloth.

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Dusty Light Particles & Pollution

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Misty Light Early Mornings

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Misty Light Ground Mist

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Foggy Light Soft Shaker Style

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Foggy Light in the Clouds

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Foggy Light over Water

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Reflected Light The Glow from Bright Ground

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Reflected Light Surrounding Fill

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Reflected Light Unexpected Spotlight

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Reflected Light Canyon Walls

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Suffused Light The Colour of Ice

“There are just a few situations where light is absorbed selectively, in a way that suffuses the entire scene with colour. One of these is photography through water, which most of the time involves the highly specialized underwater photography – too specialized for us here.”

“Water – and ice – has its own colour, with blue shading toward turquoise, because it weakly absorbs the red wavelengths. As a result, it transmits blue, which is its complementary colour.”

“Complementary colours, selective filtering: When colours are removed from white light, what remains are their complementaries across the colour circle.”

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Suffused Light Yellow to Red

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Suffused Light Coloured Windows & Awnings

“Stained glass windows in a cathedral are the easiest example to imagine, at the time of day when the sun shines directly through them. Here, in the 1920s-built ballroom of an old Indian Maharajah’s palace, coloured glass panes add a strange ambience to the already atmospheric feeling from a derelict hall that once hosted a Viceroy’s ball.”

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Filled Light Tai Chi in a Tea Garden

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Rerouted Light Deep into an Angkor Temple

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Softened Light Making a Window a Light Source

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Broadened Light Wide Diffusion from a Large Window

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Filtering Light Grads, Stoppers, Band-stops, & More

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Flare Up Distressing an Image

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Archived Light Realistic HDR from 32pbc Editing

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Time-Lapse Light Accumulating Light & Shade

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