It’s all about the light!
It’s pretty much a truism about photography that it’s all about the light. Face it, it’s built into its name - writing with light. Light is essential for any photograph. I guess it really comes down to understanding light. Making successful photographs at any given moment requires understanding what light does and how it affects the type of images you can make that will be compelling under those light conditions. So a lot about photography is working to understand light and how it affects image making. There’s little use trying to make high-contrast images with strong shadows on a heavily overcast day.
I recently downloaded a book by Bruce Percy that discusses how to make photographs, which are essentially two-dimensional, appear three dimensional. I won’t go into much detail about it other than to say it’s a fairly short book that focuses on several principles that are equally valid to keep in mind while photographing images as they are to the development of images after they have been made.
It was after I had read that book that I was suddenly taken by two images I’d made during our trip to France of what is fundamentally the same subject. It was a close-up image of a door latch and its surrounding textures - the iron latch, the wooden door and frame, the mud wall and a lower brick foundation.
It was in many ways similar to other graphic images that I’d made that first afternoon after we’d arrived. There was fairly heavy overcast at the time, so nice soft light that cast gentle shadows that help to reveal forms and texture and added a slight bit of depth to the image. It’s the type of image that is more about the subject than anything else, but with the added benefit of soft directional lighting to enhance the subject.
The next afternoon, the sun broke out for a bit and my eye caught the same door latch and I realized the image was quite different under the direct sunlight. So I headed on over to make another photograph, this time making a tighter image that focused more on the light and the shadows being cast by the direct light.
I’d originally developed the first of the two images because I found that it focused more on the subject, which was what I was more interested in. It was only after I’d read Bruce Percy’s book that, while reviewing all of the images on my monitor, that I realized that the second image was much more three-dimensional. That’s so for a number of reasons, but I decided to put my studies to the test and to accentuate that aspect of the photograph using some of the principles he’d discussed in the book. They worked.
I can’t rightly say that I prefer one over the other. Both are decent photographs, but very different types of images.
I guess that doesn’t really matter - at least I got my money’s worth from the book. That is, of course, if I remember to apply the lessons I learned from the book and these examples while I’m photographing in the future.