Bruce Barnbaum - The Art of Photography - An Approach to Personal Expression

Note

You’re first drawn to any scene because of the objects, but once you grab the camera, you must stop thinking in terms of objects, and concentrate on light.

Not only should you study where the brightest lights are distributed throughout the image area, but also see how bright they are in relationship to other areas—and, conversely, how the darkest portions of the scene compare to other areas. Can you work with those areas? Can you keep them in play? Or are they so far out of line that they can’t be worked with, no matter how hard you try? Some of the answers come from basic sound thinking, some of them from experience. You’ll have to try and fail a few times—and learn from those failures—to know the limits of what you can and cannot do. Furthermore, as your technical skills improve (either traditional or digital), you’ll expand the range of what you can work with.

Don’t be heavy-handed in your use of light. It’s wise, for example, to fight the urge to place the brightest area at, or near, the center of every composition. Such repetitive compositions quickly become boring and they indicate an inclination to “play it safe” artistically. You can play it safe for only so long before viewers lose interest or patience. It’s not a good idea to compose according to a predetermined formula, but rather to judge each photograph according to its unique circumstances. For example, it may be powerful to direct the eye to a corner of the image by clever placement of light. Sometimes such unusual and risky lighting can be immensely effective. Above all, you must fully recognize the overriding importance of light and its placement within each composition.

Exercises in Learning to See Light More Accurately

Here’s a good exercise to improve your understanding and perception of light. Whenever you think of it—driving to work, sitting at the office, out with friends—quickly frame a scene and determine the brightest and darkest spot within the frame. This may seem trivial at first. It isn’t. As you continue with the exercise, you will start to see things you missed at first. While stopped at a red light on your way to work, you might frame a scene that includes cars, buildings, street signs, and other common urban objects. Immediately, you note that the painted white line on the street is the brightest thing, but further study shows that the glint of sunlight off a car’s bumper is far brighter. Similar surprises may occur on the dark end of the scale. The black asphalt of the road may initially seem to be the darkest thing in the scene, but the open end of a ventilation duct on the side of a building may prove to be far darker.

As you continue with this simple exercise, you sharpen your seeing immensely. You then realize that you are seeing every aspect of a scene much more intensely. If you have a 1° spot meter with you to check your perceptions, that will help a great deal. For example, you’ll be amazed to see how sunlit black asphalt on the street turns out to be amazingly bright, even though you perceive it to be black.

Next, you can speculate about what would happen under other lighting conditions. On a cloudy day, there would be no glint of light off the bumper. What would be brightest object in the scene under those circumstances? As you peruse the scene for the answer, you start to envision it under alternate conditions. You begin to understand how different lighting would affect the scene.

If you are out photographing, you can begin to envision how the scene would look under altered conditions as well as under the circumstances at hand. You may determine that the photograph would be better if it were made under other conditions. An hour’s wait would put the sun lower in the sky and perhaps produce an enhanced effect. It may turn out that cloudy conditions would be best of all. If you determine that conditions are not optimal, you may be able to wait for them to improve. If you aren’t sure, make an exposure under existing conditions and again under the desired conditions, and then compare the two to determine which works best for your purpose. Along the way, you will learn a great deal about light and about your response to various types of light.

Light Determines Form

Look carefully to see how light affects lines, forms, and the relationships between objects in a scene. You’ll see that light is the determining factor. As an example, start with a single tree that has two branches, one above the other. Let’s suppose it’s a dead tree or a deciduous tree in winter, i.e., a tree with no leaves. The branches are smooth and clean. What’s the difference in appearance between the two branches at noon on a sunny day versus noon on an overcast day?

A thin, overcast cloud cover evened out the light on the live oak trees, bent like well-manicured bonsai. Sunlight would have created a patchwork of light and dark splotches. Soft light allowed each trunk, branch, and leaf to stand out unbroken and undisturbed by shadows from higher limbs. I had full control of contrast through negative exposure and development and printing techniques, but I could not have altered the light had it been patchy.

Figure 5-3. Live Oak Forest, Sapelo Island

On a sunny day, the upper branch may cast its shadow across the lower one, but the upper branch may be fully lit by sunlight. Both branches are physically continuous, of course, but the lower branch appears photographically discontinuous because of the shadow that interrupts its tonal continuity. It’s sunlit at one end, suddenly dark in the center, then sunlit beyond the shadow. For photographic purposes, it is effectively broken into three distinct sections. The upper branch has no such tonal discontinuity, so it is both photographically continuous and physically continuous.

Note

Light determines form.

On a cloudy day, however, where no shadows are cast, both branches are photographically continuous and physically continuous. There are no tonal breaks along their entire lengths. This shows how light alone can alter the form of an object for photographic purposes. In fact, from a photographer’s point of view, light determines the form of those two branches. On a cloudy day, the branches are photographically and physically continuous, but on a sunny day the lower branch is no longer photographically continuous, even though it is just as continuous physically.

There are also other subtle differences. On the sunny day, the sunlit upper portion of each branch is extremely bright, then there is a sharp tonal jump to the shadowed lower portion of each branch. Yet on a cloudy day the brightness on the upper branch gradually grades to a slightly darker bottom. Thus, a cross-section of the branch on a sunny day could just as well be that of a diamond-shaped object as a circle, but on the cloudy day, the soft gradation of light reveals that it is indeed a circle.

This simple example tells you that when you get behind the camera you have to look at light rather than at subject matter. “Photographic seeing” is very different from “everyday seeing”. In everyday seeing, there are two branches coming out of the trunk that are physically continuous. In photographic seeing, you recognize that on a sunny day the lower branch appears as three separate pieces; the two end pieces relate to one another, but the shadowed piece in the center does not relate to either of them.

Now visualize a whole forest of trees under sunny or cloudy conditions. On a cloudy day, each trunk and limb is physically and photographically continuous. This means that as you follow each branch from beginning to end, there are no abrupt tonal changes along its entire length. But on a sunny day, spots of light break up each trunk, limb, and branch into patches of light and dark. Visually, the spots of light on one trunk relate more to the spots of light on other trunks than they do to the rest of the trunk that is shaded. As a result, the visual continuity of each trunk, limb, or branch is lost.