For this assignment you will draw together the different lighting techniques you have been studying and apply them to one subject.
I would guess that the majority of the photographs I have taken over the years have been using natural light, so it will be interesting to see how I’ll cope with using various other lighting techniques – but also perhaps natural light – to reveal the various properties of an object. Which kind of light will be best at revealing a particular property? Will fluorescent light reveal texture more than natural light? Is it more dependent on the property rather than the light? Is daylight better for colour? Is flash good for texture? Is artificial light of any kind better at revealing a particular property? Are there any absolutes as far as a kind of light and a particular property are concerned? Or is the point to experiment, to try things out?
I think perhaps everything has the various properties that this assignment is all about and everything can be photographed in a variety of different lighting conditions. The problem is to choose an object which has obvious shape, form, texture and colour and which can be lit to clearly illustrate these properties.
And what kind of constraint can I put on myself, my choice of object, for this assignment?
There are a variety of souvenirs around the house that have been picked up on travels over the last 20-odd years – some dating back to travelling through Asia in the mid-eighties and others from more recent travels, like Portugal last year, for example. I’m not sure which, but I think one of them would be good for this assignment.
As I implied above, the choice of object is crucial.
A close look at 2 or 3 of the objects under different lighting conditions reveals that, as is pretty obvious, I guess, some properties are more obvious than others. The shape of any of the objects can be easily revealed by a silhouette under whatever light, whereas the texture is not so easily revealed under whatever light. So: it’s easy to reveal the shape property, far less so the texture property.
I spent a couple of days shooting each of my chosen objects from every possible angle, in every kind light. (So good to have a digital camera: I would have binned 15 rolls of film or more by now just on this assignment alone.)
The problem is that I can’t get a single object to illustrate all the properties with the different kinds of light. For example: I can flash one of the objects to well-illustrate shape, another of the objects in natural light well-illustrates texture, and so on. Not good. Back to the shelf to choose a different object. (A loaf of bread has been recommended: an easy subject that lots of people choose, apparently. But who wants an easy subject that lots of people thave chosen?!) A buddha, from India, I think; this might be the one. It seems somehow unfortunate – that it is so central to the assignment, that the choice of object is so important. What if I was a pro, on some photographic commission, and had to photograph some object, some work of art, perhaps. I couldn’t really say, Oh no, I can’t photograph that, I can’t reveal the texture, can I photograph something else please?
I’ve been re-reading parts of Itten’s “Design and Form”. A part of the texture section has a list of different materials – bark, fur, metal, stone – all different textures on different objects (likely, of course). Also, the texture of wood/bark can be felt, it’s rough, it has a strong 3-D property, generally; it’s the ‘conversion’ to 2-D in a photograph that is a problem.
I mentioned earlier that perhaps it seems a shame that the choice of object is more important than the photography. Of course, I need to be able to, my photography needs to be good enough to convey a 3-D property in a 2-D image, to convey a ‘feeling’, a property, an atmosphere via a photograph.
And then my mind wanders. I think about the difference/similarity between an image and a photograph or, perhaps more accurately, the difference/similarity between the the 2 words image and photograph. And that of course they are not synonyms. I use my camera to take a photograph and then the image develops from it, via the darkroom, digital, thankfully! Cropping, under-/over-exposure, etc. etc. Or that actually there’s a step before taking the photograph that I have missed out: having an idea! The idea is how I would like (would want) the image to turn out. So I take a photograph with this idea/image in mind. Then I look at the photograph and see that it’s not quite (not at all) what I had in mind. (Does the photograph ever meet expectations? Does the photograph ever really match the image you had in mind?) So I manipulate the photograph and hopefully end up with something a little closer to what I had in mind. So it goes something like this:-
A legend might go something like 1 and 2 are pressing the shutter and doing a bit of manipulation and 3 is the skill in getting the image to look like the idea that I had in mind originally.
Or as I’m working in my digital darkroom I have other ideas – for better or worse – and start moving away from my original idea. Not necessarily a good/bad thing: I could say at least the idea has developed. And then I think it doesn’t matter whether the ‘change’ in the image is good or bad, the skill lies in being able to produce ‘the original intention’. And then I think this – this digression – is getting just a little, or very, pretentious.
Back to Itten… There’s an interesting line regarding interpretation/imitation. He says that the material/texture part of the program was meant to be interpretive rather than imitative. However, I feel that this assignment is asking me to imitate the texture of my chosen subject. Surely the more accurate my imitation the better I have succeeded. ‘Oh yes, he’s really captured the texture of that surface’.
That’s enough digression for the time being. Although…
I think shape’s going to be the easiest property to convey (I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but please note that some of my blog text is transcribed from notes I’ve scribbled the old-fashioned way, i.e. yes! I write things down!) With shape it doesn’t really matter that much what the lighting conditions are: a silhouette is a silhouette, backlit by a torch, or candlelight, or sunlight. Texture is going to be the most difficult. Form? Colour?
The shape of an object is perhaps it’s most obvious property or characteristic. But form? It’s back to an object’s 3-D quality, but conveying that property using a 2-D image. I need to play around with light to get a good combination of light/shadow. Could any kind of light bring out the form of an object? My chosen object has obvious form, although that doesn’t mean to say I’m going to be able to convey it easily.
OK. This has been like some kind of essay so far. I need to get in to the practical side. Although I do enjoy this potentially pretentious theorizing! And I do feel it helps.
Outside, in garden, moving from bright sun to dark shadow; moving from open space to space enclosed by trees and bushes. Green grass and green leaves affecting the colour of my object. I haven’t mentioned colour yet: the object I have chosen has a very different colour front/back which perhaps I can use somehow.) Moved inside; experimenting with daylight in the house, in different parts of the house. (The colour of the object again being influenced by the colours around the object.) Night-time and now a chance to experiment with artificial light (although I guess I could experiment with mixtures of light. But perhaps that should be a constraint for this assignment: one kind of light – fluorescent or daylight, for example, but not both. How complex would that make it re temperature/white balance etc?)
It’s all just experimentation at the moment, inside and outside, with very different kinds of light: changing the position of the light, the kind of light, the position/angle from which the object is photographed. And it’s another one of these amazing things about digital photography: just imagine having to make a note of exposure readings – this shutter speed at that aperture – and so on (even the focal length!), when all I have to do is check the exif data. Fantastic!
Downloading images to PC, organizing my image library (all done in Lightroom) and trawling my way through hundreds of image. Still not sure whether I’ve got my workflow optimised, but the 1st part is always to get rid of the rubbish (well that’s 95% gone! Ha ha!) Event that’s hard for me (you should see my loft!): however bad an image maybe it could be used for some future assignment or project.
As I look through my images it sometimes feels as if I’m working backwards here – that I’m looking at an image and saying Yes that was taken in diffuse daylight and it illustrates well the form of my object. This seems somehow the wrong way round. Does that make sense? Some of my images are OK, but still I wonder if my choice of object is wrong.
I’ve got 8 images together which, I think, just about do the job, but I’m not particularly happy with them. As I’ve done with all my assignments, I’ll upload them to some personal web space I have and wait for feedback from my tutor. (That’s another great thing about this new way of doing things, all this new technology: I don’t have to send hard copies to my tutor, get them assessed, re-submit with suggested changes and on and on. Well, I do, but I submit soft copies, I upload altered images, or brand new images, instantaneously. Sometimes I think I’d like to be a luddite, but I’d be a pretty crap one!)
I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s having difficulty with this assignment! Excellent suggestion from tutor – to consider de-saturating my ‘form’ images and thus concentrate more on that particular property and not be distracted by the colour of the object. Another suggestion is to use more variety as far as the angle/position of the object is concerned. Certainly a valid point: my images do look rather static as they are all either side- or front-on at present. (Almost right) back to the drawing board… Something else I hadn’t considered before is to use a different background colour: I’ve used only white so far. Perhaps worth considering.
So something I try to avoid as much as possible: more manipulation is creeping into my work. I de-saturated my ‘form’ images and that has improved the assignment. I’m not completely convinced it has made a great deal of difference to how much more ‘of the object’s form it has revealed, but I think it has had a positive effect on the set of assignment images as a whole: the set is more dynamic. And de-saturation is not really that manipulative.
I have finally put together a set of images that I think do illustrate the 4 properties: shape, form, texture and colour.
Originally I thought of this assignment as boring or, perhaps, uninteresting. It felt a little like an ‘I guess it has to be done’ experience. But then on second (third and fourth) thoughts, that seemed unfair. Yes, it does have to be done; it has to be studied, so it was a valuable experience and it has, like the course generally, made me look and think. Light and the fundamental properties of each and every object. So important!
Below are my final 8 assignment 4 images, each with a short note indicating lighting conditions.
Shape
Shape 1
LIGHTING CONDITIONS: cloudless late afternoon sun, object silhouetted side-on.
Assignment 4: applying lighting techniques
Shape 2
LIGHTING CONDITIONS: halogen spotlight from behind diffused through 80 gsm white paper.
Assignment 4: applying lighting techniques
Form
Form 1
LIGHTING CONDITIONS: outdoors, midday, overcast, diffuse light.
Assignment 4: applying lighting techniques
Form 2
LIGHTING CONDITIONS: early morning, cloudy day, indoors; object placed on windowsill with daylight – from right – diffused with greaseproof paper plus added halogen spotlight – from left – diffused with 80 gsm white paper.
Assignment 4: applying lighting techniques
Texture
Texture 1
LIGHTING CONDITIONS: sunny day, indoors (in living room furnished with variety of colours).
Assignment 4: applying lighting techniques
Texture 2
LIGHTING CONDITIONS: halogen spotlight from slight angle diffused through greaseproof paper.
Assignment 4: applying lighting techniques
Colour
Colour 1
LIGHTING CONDITIONS: daylight, early morning, light cloud.
Assignment 4: applying lighting techniques
Colour 2
LIGHTING CONDITIONS: rear of object to illustrate very different colour to front. Indoors, late morning, light cloud, fill-in flash.
Assignment 4: applying lighting techniques
LIGHTING CONDITIONS: cloudless late afternoon sun, object silhouetted side-on.
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