06

What Is the Light Doing?

WE HAVE ONLY A FEW RAW MATERIALS in photography: light, space, and time. What we do with these using the box in our hands determines what our photograph will look like. Being able to see them and understand them, especially knowing how the camera sees them, is the lifelong pursuit of the photographer. For my purposes as a teacher, I have often reduced my approach to a scene to three questions that serve as reminders of these raw materials: What is the light doing, what are the lines doing, and when is the moment? This book further unpacks these questions, not only by asking, for example, about the light itself, but what choices we can make with that light.

When we first learn to use a camera, we most often approach it more as a capture device—a tool for making correct, literal exposures—rather than a creative tool full of possibilities. We rarely begin our journey of craft being told that the camera sees the world differently than we do, and that in those differences—the constraints of shutter speeds and apertures, film and sensor sensitivity, and optics—lie worlds of possibilities.

So while the first question I often ask is “What is the light doing?” my next one is usually “What can I do with the light?” And each of these questions contains galaxies of other questions, all of them giving me devices with which to both explore and express my subject.

As photographers, light gives us assets. It creates effects, though we often take those for granted without a camera in our hands. Light gives us shadows and reflections. The quality of the light determines the quality of the shadows: Are they long and bold, or soft and feathered? In which direction do they run? What do they hide or reveal? It is very tempting to think in terms of good light and bad light, but that is a distinction I urge you not to make. Light is neither good nor bad, but rather gives certain assets we can either use or not. It is either helpful to your specific intent for an image (if you have one) or it is not. But it’s a creatively hobbled mind that doesn’t see the light for what it is and ask, “What can I do with this?”

For several years, I favoured soft light. I knew what to do with it and how to work it. Seeing harder light and bold shadows, I would retreat behind the too-convenient belief that “the light was bad” rather than making something with what I had. There’s nothing wrong with favouring a certain kind of light, but that’s not the same thing as being too lazy or too scared to take the creative or technical risks that allow you to discover the possibilities that other light offers.

What’s your preference in light? Could it be that your belief in the so-called magic hour is blinding you to the other 23 hours, all with their own magic, all of them giving you something you could use? Could your belief that some light is fundamentally not good or useful create expectations for you that are stopping you from seeing it as it truly is and for what it can contribute to your image?

Perhaps it’s not about the hard or soft quality of the light for you. Maybe it’s about the direction of the light—the way you’ve always preferred to have the sun coming over your shoulder, evenly front-lighting your subject, and you’ve forgotten that a subject all about texture or dimension might be better expressed using sidelight. Nothing gives better expression to texture or dimension than sidelight.

If your subject isn’t about texture but instead is all about gesture (a man leading his camel train across the desert, for example), then backlight is a great choice. All you have to do is get to a position where you can shoot into the sun, placing it between you and the man and his camels. In this case, the details don’t matter because it’s all about shape.

This is where the question expands from being about what the light is doing to what you do with the light. This is the dance. So you underexpose the image relative to what the camera wants, knowing that the camera is going to nudge you toward seeing detail in the man and his camels, and knowing you don’t want those details. No one is ever going to ask who that man is or which particular camels he’s walking. If the subject of the photograph is about the shape of the camels and the colour of the setting sun, then it will not likely find better expression, at least where light is concerned, than with a backlit silhouette.

Remember, my hope here is not to teach you all about light; that’s a book in itself. My hope is to connect the dots between what you already know about light and the camera’s way of dealing with it to help make you increasingly aware of the many possibilities of using that light to interpret the subject. Another way of exploring this might be, “How can I use the light to best convey the point of the image I want to make?” Would moving around to see the light from all angles give you fresh eyes on this? Would waiting an hour give you new shadows or more intense colours? Would overriding the camera meter and underexposing it to make those shadows darker or those colours more saturated help make your image stronger when it’s about mystery or about the play of those colours?

I do not use a lot of strobes in my photography, but for those who do, there are further questions and possibilities because you can change the position of those lights, adjust their power and direction, modify their colours, and more. But it’s easy to get carried away with those effects—to use an effect for its own sake—and in so doing, to forget that the photograph is probably not about the effect. I’m not saying you shouldn’t experiment and play with your strobes in an effort to develop your intention and vision for an image; I’m saying you shouldn’t let lighting techniques override everything else. Clever lighting itself is not the point of the image. Remember to identify your actual subject. What is the photograph really about? Now find ways to make it powerfully and creatively about that. If others talk more about the effects and devices you used to make the image than they do about what you had hoped the picture would actually achieve, then you’ve made a photograph in which the subject is the effect itself, and not many of us will be moved by that.

Considering questions like these can help bring us new ideas and directions:

• What is the light doing? What does it give me in this moment?
• What decisions can I make with my exposure to best use this light? Would my subject be better expressed by being under- or overexposed?
• What direction is the light coming from, and can I change that by moving the position of the camera?
• Can I modify the light by bouncing it, diffusing it, or supplementing it?
• Would waiting for the light to change be more effective than using what I’ve got right now?

Sometimes the light isn’t the point. Sometimes other choices will give your subject the strongest expression, such as a moment so powerful that the photograph could be made in any light at all. But that’s the case with all the elements and decisions that go into making a photograph. Remember that this is about possibilities, not prescriptions. If the answer to my initial question of, “What is the light doing?” is “It really doesn’t matter,” then move on. But light is one of the few raw materials we have, so you still need to ask the question, then make an exposure that considers your subject and what you want to say about it.