As you continue with this simple exercise, you sharpen your seeing immensely. You then realize that you are seeing every aspect of a scene much more intensely. If you have a 1° spot meter with you to check your perceptions, that will help a great deal. For example, you’ll be amazed to see how sunlit black asphalt on the street turns out to be amazingly bright, even though you perceive it to be black.
Next, you can speculate about what would happen under other lighting conditions. On a cloudy day, there would be no glint of light off the bumper. What would be brightest object in the scene under those circumstances? As you peruse the scene for the answer, you start to envision it under alternate conditions. You begin to understand how different lighting would affect the scene.
If you are out photographing, you can begin to envision how the scene would look under altered conditions as well as under the circumstances at hand. You may determine that the photograph would be better if it were made under other conditions. An hour’s wait would put the sun lower in the sky and perhaps produce an enhanced effect. It may turn out that cloudy conditions would be best of all. If you determine that conditions are not optimal, you may be able to wait for them to improve. If you aren’t sure, make an exposure under existing conditions and again under the desired conditions, and then compare the two to determine which works best for your purpose. Along the way, you will learn a great deal about light and about your response to various types of light.
Light Determines Form
Look carefully to see how light affects lines, forms, and the relationships between objects in a scene. You’ll see that light is the determining factor. As an example, start with a single tree that has two branches, one above the other. Let’s suppose it’s a dead tree or a deciduous tree in winter, i.e., a tree with no leaves. The branches are smooth and clean. What’s the difference in appearance between the two branches at noon on a sunny day versus noon on an overcast day?
A thin, overcast cloud cover evened out the light on the live oak trees, bent like well-manicured bonsai. Sunlight would have created a patchwork of light and dark splotches. Soft light allowed each trunk, branch, and leaf to stand out unbroken and undisturbed by shadows from higher limbs. I had full control of contrast through negative exposure and development and printing techniques, but I could not have altered the light had it been patchy.
Figure 5-3. Live Oak Forest, Sapelo Island
On a sunny day, the upper branch may cast its shadow across the lower one, but the upper branch may be fully lit by sunlight. Both branches are physically continuous, of course, but the lower branch appears photographically discontinuous because of the shadow that interrupts its tonal continuity. It’s sunlit at one end, suddenly dark in the center, then sunlit beyond the shadow. For photographic purposes, it is effectively broken into three distinct sections. The upper branch has no such tonal discontinuity, so it is both photographically continuous and physically continuous.
Note
Light determines form.
On a cloudy day, however, where no shadows are cast, both branches are photographically continuous and physically continuous. There are no tonal breaks along their entire lengths. This shows how light alone can alter the form of an object for photographic purposes. In fact, from a photographer’s point of view, light determines the form of those two branches. On a cloudy day, the branches are photographically and physically continuous, but on a sunny day the lower branch is no longer photographically continuous, even though it is just as continuous physically.
There are also other subtle differences. On the sunny day, the sunlit upper portion of each branch is extremely bright, then there is a sharp tonal jump to the shadowed lower portion of each branch. Yet on a cloudy day the brightness on the upper branch gradually grades to a slightly darker bottom. Thus, a cross-section of the branch on a sunny day could just as well be that of a diamond-shaped object as a circle, but on the cloudy day, the soft gradation of light reveals that it is indeed a circle.
This simple example tells you that when you get behind the camera you have to look at light rather than at subject matter. “Photographic seeing” is very different from “everyday seeing”. In everyday seeing, there are two branches coming out of the trunk that are physically continuous. In photographic seeing, you recognize that on a sunny day the lower branch appears as three separate pieces; the two end pieces relate to one another, but the shadowed piece in the center does not relate to either of them.
Now visualize a whole forest of trees under sunny or cloudy conditions. On a cloudy day, each trunk and limb is physically and photographically continuous. This means that as you follow each branch from beginning to end, there are no abrupt tonal changes along its entire length. But on a sunny day, spots of light break up each trunk, limb, and branch into patches of light and dark. Visually, the spots of light on one trunk relate more to the spots of light on other trunks than they do to the rest of the trunk that is shaded. As a result, the visual continuity of each trunk, limb, or branch is lost.
A photograph of the forest under such spotty conditions may look more like a pizza than a forest. The photographic situation no longer parallels the physical situation. The physical lines and forms of the forest are the same under cloudy or sunny conditions, but from the point of view of photography, everything has changed. Continuity has been lost. Light alone has made the difference. Light determines form (Figure 5-3).
Can you photograph a forest on a sunny day with any semblance of success, or is it just something that inevitably leads to failure? Of course you can, but you have to see (i.e., understand) exactly what the light is doing. One of the key strategies that I employ is backlighting, or photographing directly toward the sun, thus looking at the shaded side of the trees. With the sun coming toward me, the trees in front of me are completely in shade, with those slightly off to the sides are just edged by sunlight. This tends to make everything far more cohesive and controllable (Figure 5-1 and Figure 5-4). But, you might ask, won’t the contrast be excessive, making it impossible to photograph? No, not a bit, as Figure 5-1 and Figure 5-4 attest. (See Chapter 8, Chapter 9, and Chapter 11 to understand how to control such light.)
However, I also caution against using this suggestion of backlighting as a formula or rule to employ on sunny days. Backlighting is one strategy I employ in a forest on bright, sunny days, but it’s not the only one. What I recommend is looking carefully at the light and the forms as you walk through a forest, because all the right things may converge at some point to make an unlikely situation occur—such as an opening that allows cross light to shine on a group of trees exactly where you need it. Don’t discount that possibility, for it can happen.
Using the same basic approach to bright, harsh sunlight in a forest as in Figure 5-1, I aimed my camera directly toward the sun, using a foreground tree to block it out. On a very cold December morning, with fog steaming up from the sunlit swamp, I placed the darkest shadows high on the exposure scale. This allowed me to convey the magical feeling of light emanating from everything in the scene.