Light and shade

Sun shadows

One of the fascinations about living in a brand new space is finding out how the light behaves during the days, at different times, in varying weather.

Four adults of a certain age sat watching a shadow theatre on one of the walls of the living room at the Tree House. It immediately took us back in time, to an age of innocence, when fathers and uncles had occasionally made shadow puppets on our bedroom walls, simply to entertain us at bed time. This was before my parents owned even a black and white television set.

The other evening, a bunch of flowers in a vase atop one of the radiator covers, together with some decorative foliage, managed to conjure from our imaginations a North American Indian's head, in profile, complete with feathers, and then, as the sun moved steadily across the sky, a rabbit with large eyes. The final, sun-setting fireworks left us in no doubt that we were looking at a galleon under full sail, just like the one worn as a hat by the giant in Terry Gilliam's surreal Film "Time Bandits".

I will continue to watch what happens.

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.

Kitchen roll

I walked into the kitchen as Sparkly was about to sweep a pile of vegetable peelings from the work surface into the rubbish bin. They were backlit, dramatically, by a low, strong, bright bundle of the evening sun’s rays bursting through a high, small window. I stopped her mid-swipe. She knew from the look on my face what was coming next. Living with a photographer can be weird at times.

The first picture on this post is what I’d imagined the end result would be, but getting it right needed a little extra work. The contrast range of the fierce lighting was too great for my little point-and-shoot to handle unaided, and it’s exposure system was screaming in protest at having to decide which of the tones to lose, in order to make the best of what it was computing.

The second picture is what the camera gave, unaided, in such extreme lighting conditions. I dislike the lack of detail in the light tones: the parsnip skins have lost their texture. Gone is that subtle, cream colouring. The mid tones are OK, but the shadows have blocked up, gone black, dead. There is too much detail missing to please me.

Strong sunlight is harsh and cruel: that's why so many flower photos fail to please. Such brightly coloured, delicately textured subjects are usually best captured during cloudy, overcast days. To get the most from these glowing parings, I needed to invent a miniature cloudy sky, and fast. A few moments later, with a roll of kitchen paper (just the ordinary, everyday stuff used to line cake tins) held up by my willing collaborator, and I’d got the shot I wanted for this blog.

The third snap shows the setup. It gives you an overview of the surroundings. It reveals how the sunlight was modified by the paper. You could say the original hard light source (meaning that which created hard-edged, dark shadows, with small, strong highlights) had been softened.

A soft light source generally results in shadows with more diffuse edges, lighter tones and smoother, broader highlights. If you were a fly on the sweet potato rind when the roll of paper was unfurled, you’d have thought that the sun had gone in behind a big, white cloud. That large area of much gentler light reduced the contrast range in the subject, giving the tiny camera a chance to accommodate the reduced number of tonal steps into it’s limited response.

Using cameras teaches us to see more clearly, but our eyes and brains are infinitely better at reproducing at our immediate surroundings than any optical machinery we have invented so far. That means, as photographers, if we are to materialise the images we first imagine in our mind’s eye, then we must learn to work within the limtations of the photographic process. So, the fourth shot in this series required the camera’s built-in flash. I almost always keep it turned off permanently, since I so love to explore what is possible using only available light, but in this instance I needed to pump extra illumination into the deep, dark shadows of that against-the-light scene, so that the camera could show you more of what was really going on.