Light and shade

Ruby

Photographers use the phrase “available lighting” when talking about how a picture was made using whatever illumination was there at the time. Using available light usually leads to a quicker, more fluid way of working than, say, setting up in a studio full of lamps, or rigging portable lights on location.

When I teach lighting, I prefer to talk about light sources. A source of light can come from a window, or a cloudy sky, or a bare bulb hanging from a ceiling. I wrote about on-camera flash recently, a light source I use as only as a last resort.

If you look around you carefully, you’ll begin to recognise many kinds of light sources. Using available light creatively can be fun, as it was for this informal portrait.

Ruby was one of many people at a family gathering on Christmas Day. She was intent on grappling with some badly behaved software, when I noticed her striking hair style. Although the room lights were on, it was the glow from the bright screen in front of her which caught my imagination. Turning off the overhead lights and turning up the ISO speed on my point-and-shoot to 800 allowed me to use the computer screen as an available light source, at the same time throwing the background walls and furniture into darkness. I removed the colour afterwards, preferring this monochrome version.

If you’d like to try this approach, but don’t know how to change the ISO speed on your camera, look for a “night scene” setting instead. Or keep it on “Auto” and remember to switch off the flash. If that’s not easy, and menus can be a pain, simply block it off with a spare finger.

Editing

I said yesterday that I didn’t like using on-camera flash. Afterwards, I thought about my original purpose in creating this blog, which was to show you how I achieve some of my results.

So, here are two photographs, made from one identical camera exposure. On the left is exactly what the camera gave me, made on a setting I call auto-just-about-everything. The point is that professional picture editors want results first and art second. So getting the shot for them is all-important. Moments of pure fun like these evaporate faster than flaming vodka on a Christmas Pudding, so I end up catching as many of them as I can, then sending the original files away and forcing myself to suspend the inner critic.

The version on the right has had some Photoshop editing. The fundamental lighting hasn’t changed at all. I’ve just tried to tone down some of the more objectionable aspects, and tidy up the rushed composition by cropping it, to see if I could “improve” things. It’s a kind of re-balance, the visual equivalent of an audio re-mix. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t. Please choose whichever picture you prefer: we all see things differently.

The arty bits I did purely for myself. I was particularly taken with this beautifully constructed owl lantern.

Three lanterns

‘Twas the night before the Winter Solstice, and my dear old friend Alex had again asked me to photograph the parade of lanterns in Salisbury, Wiltshire.

This year’s event was the biggest ever, with about 850 people of mixed ages processing through the centre of this historic English Cathedral City, carrying on high the lanterns they’d made under Alex’s patient, creative guidance during the many workshops he’d held earlier this year.

I dutifully amassed scores of shots to Al’s brief. None of them were the kind of images I’d make if left to my own devices, but there are times when professional standards means obeying the client’s instructions, because the photographs were needed to tell a certain story. On-camera flash isn’t my favourite form of artificial lighting, but sometimes it simply can’t be avoided for spontaneous press work on freezing cold, pitch black nights.

When it was all over, I spent a few minutes looking at the world through my own eyes again: work hard, play hard is my motto. These two girls had jumped down into one of the grassy pits containing the pairs of powerful floodlights which illuminate Salisbury Cathedral and its tall spire each night.

I made exactly the kind of picture that satisfies me on several counts, and it’s one that neatly answers those who ask me what I like to photograph. My main interest is, and has always been, the way light behaves: what it does, and how it can be recorded, however challenging that may be. In such conditions as these, persuading even the best digital electronics to capture a recognisable view requires the application of some fairly extreme techniques. But if you’ve only got a little point-and-shoot, just fix a “night” scene setting, them jam yourself and your camera against something solid (big, old trees are good) and don’t press the button until after you’ve breathed out, because image stabilisation systems need as much help as you can give them in very low light.

Regular observers will also recognise yet another addition to my virtually eternal series of “threes”.

Public footpath

There are times when I make a picture for no other reason than that I can. It’s the pure fun of it. What you see here is exactly what the camera gave me.

Today, at lunchtime, was one of those rare, glorious winter days, with clear, crisp, cold air and low, brilliant sunlight. After eating a hot meal, I put on a warm coat, scarf, hat and gloves, then struck out along a nearby public footpath, into the fresh, clean Worcestershire countryside, for fifteen minutes of walking pleasure. And it just so happened that I’d arranged for one of my coat pockets to contain a point-and-shoot camera, naturally enough.