Sunday, January 11, 2009

Some Thoughts On Lighting

What a wonderful thing we photographers do! We get to re-present the best of what the Maker has created and we get to expose the worst of world’s injustice. When you boil it down, that’s pretty much what we do.

HOW we do it has really gotten cool lately. The world of digital has brought a huge amount of change. It’s made photography so accessible for so many people in creative ways that couldn’t be imagined just a few years ago and that’s AWESOME.

One thing that hasn’t changed though is the language we speak. As photographers we speak the language of light - the original language of the universe.

Think about it, the earth was formless and void until BAMMO! “Let there be light!” and that, my friends, was the very first thing that the Lord said was “good”. He created the heavens and the earth, but it wasn’t called “good” until He properly lit His subject. He’s been doing that ever since, placing His creation in the best light possible. Adulterous, lying, murdering King David is “lit” by God and called a “man after His own heart”; Sarah laughs at God and is called “faithful”; you and I have our own history, yet He calls us “His beloved”.

A classically trained portrait photographer is taught to use light to draw out the subject’s strong points while using selective shadowing to de-emphasize the parts that are best left in the dark, if you know what I mean. A landscape photographer will be in place long before the sun comes up so the light will be perfect and is rewarded with an image that inspires “ahhs” from all who see the final print. A commercial photographer sculpts and crafts light for hours with scrims, snoots, gobos, flags, spots, softboxes, reflectors… and the client has her $5 product looking like a million bucks. What do all these photographers have in common? They’re all playing God, speaking His language, making His creation look its best.

Physicists are even making the case these days that we, the earth and everything that we see & touch, is composed of nothing more than light itself. That’s way over my head, but it sounds really cool.

My point in all this is (yes, I really have a point!) is that as photographers, wouldn’t it be awesome for us to really master our language? The better our vocabulary, the more eloquent our speech becomes. The better our speech, the more clearly we’re understood, and that’s really all we want, right?

Now I’m not down on all the jazzy Photoshop actions, plugins, filters, etc, etc – I love ‘em all, in fact I’m pedaling hard to learn them all! But what I’m dying to hear in conversations between photogs is “how’d you light that?”, “what time of day did you shoot that?”, “was that a fill-flash or a reflector?”… you get the point.

So, maybe we can have some of those conversations right here – I’d love to learn some of YOUR vocabulary. What do you think?

- Bret never seems to get up early enough for the killer landscape shots, never seems to have enough lights, gobos, etc. for the commercial shoots, and can never figure out why his portrait subjects always want to look like someone else! :)

2 comments:

  1. Please feel free to post a comment here - love to hear what you have to say...

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  2. Great article, Bret! I cannot wait for more! You are such an inspiration!!!!

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