Tip: look at the light first, then find your subject

Monday 17 December 2018, 19:38 by Elvira Smit | 5,597 views | 2 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

A philosophical question: is a photo a picture of a subject, or is it a picture of the light falling on that subject? The latter, as far as I'm concerned. I adapt my way of working accordingly. A short explanation in three steps.

Photographing is writing with light, without light there is no photo. I was recently in Colombia, where the light is a real feast. The colours are hyper-saturated in some areas, as if someone had used the “saturation” slider in Lightroom a little too enthusiastically, see the (unedited) photo below.

Lessons about light

By now, I have taken quite a few photography courses and workshops. I will undoubtedly have learnt a lot from them, but most of it now belongs to my latent knowledge, I can no longer retrieve it.

Except for the lessons about light, because they taught me to look at the world differently. Suddenly, I recognised 'buttery-soft' light (no shadows) and 'hard light' (high-contrast shadows). And everything in between.

Focusing on light taught me that when taking a photo, the how is more important than the what.

Beautiful light

I started looking at the world with different eyes, and I still do. For example, I invariably mutter 'beautiful light' in the hour before sunset. Everything gets a deep golden glow, if you're lucky and the sun isn't behind the clouds, which can also produce beautiful light, of course.

And thanks to an assignment where I had to photograph the sunrise for hours in a nature reserve one morning, I now know that the light really changes significantly every few minutes.

But what did I do with that knowledge during a holiday in Colombia?

Here's a guide in 3 steps:

1. Find beautiful light, then choose your subject

The light in your photo creates the atmosphere, the amount of texture in the objects, the colour and where your attention is drawn. In the first photo in this article (taken in Valle de Cocora), the light makes the many folds in the landscape particularly easy to see. That makes the photo interesting to look at, together with those bizarre palm trees.

2. Determine where the light is coming from

If you want hard shadows, photograph into the sun. If you want warmer light, photograph with the sun behind you. I previously wrote at length about this in an article about how the sun is always in charge.

In the photo below, the (meagre) light came from above and fell straight onto a horse's back. I would never have photographed that horse otherwise, but because of the way the light fell, I suddenly thought it was worth doing.

3. Wait for the light to change

All light is temporary. So it may well get even better. It's worth hanging around for a while to see what happens. I took the photo below 2 hours after the photo at the top of this article.

My friend and I had set out on a hike in which we had to climb 600 metres. And so we suddenly found ourselves in the clouds. There wasn't much to see, apart from the outlines of 60-metre-high palm trees and my friend beside them. Waiting for me to finally carry on walking.

I think the atmosphere in the photo is exactly right. A little eerie and otherworldly.

More practice

That sunrise exercise I wrote about above is highly recommended, by the way. You do have to get out of bed early, but afterwards you'll really understand the impact of light on your photo. Focus solely on the light and don't keep lugging your camera around endlessly in search of the best spot.

Just stay where you are and see what happens. In the meantime, decide which settings you need to achieve the result you want, and be amazed at how often you have to adjust those settings because of changes in the light.

Fancy more tips like this? Every week I write two articles about how you can learn to see.

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