So, I recently started a lighting class last week. I have it every Wednesday evening for 3 hours. Light to a photographer is like music to a musician. If you don’t have a good understanding of light and how it works, you will always struggle to portray what you want to say. Sometimes, luck is on your side and everything works beautifully, the light is doing what you want and all in the world is right. Other times it’s a fight to the death…and you never win that fight. Or so it seems. If you understand the way it plays or moves on things you can conquer it, but you must first study it and how it works to really be in control. I am not there yet, but I will be. It’s much more complicated than one would think and just when you have one thing down, the light changes. So, in my attempt to conquer and be a study of light I am taking this class, which I absolutely love, even if I did leave this week feeling as though I was trying to get a grasp on the enormity of the universe. This last week our assignment was to pick something, anything, and write down adjectives of our subject. As my teacher was sharing our assignment I immediately became obsessed with his salt and pepper beard and could think of so many words I could use to describe it, prickly, brittle, wiry, etc. We were then supposed to photograph our subject in such a way that made clear our descriptions. How do you do this? By using light and manipulating it to showcase what you want to say. I couldn’t think of anyone that had a beard quite like his and would sit forever while I moved objects all around his head to move the light the way I wanted it, so I scrapped that idea and instead became very interested in the suds from my shampoo one day. I am really into textures and how they photograph, so I knew I wanted to do something that had a lot of texture for me to bring out. The suds picture is what I came up with. I was pleased, but I know I haven’t quite nailed it. But now that I’ve been looking at light in a whole new light, pun intended, I began looking at some of my old work and decided to share some pictures that are my favorite, not necessarily because of the subject, but because I loved what the light was doing and the way it said what I wanted to convey. “How can I preserve and light the way…” Caedmon’s Call
