Lighting (part 1)

PRINTING COMPOSITIONS

This is the contact sheet containing the images for my still life and landscape photos. FILTER: 4.5, TIME: 30, APERTURE: 5.6

This is my soft-light still life image. FILTER: NONE, APERTURE: 4, TIME: 15

This is the test strip for the soft-light still life image. APERTURE: 4, TIME: 15, FILTER: NONE

This is my hard-light still life image. APERTURE: 4, TIME: 50, FILTER: NONE

This is my hard-light portrait image. APERTURE: 11, TIME: 66, FILTER: NONE

This is the test strip for the hard-light portrait image. APERTURE: 8, TIME: 24

This is the soft-light portrait image. TIME: 30, APERTURE: 11

This is the test strip for the soft-light portrait image. TIME: 20-25-30, APERTURE: 11

DIARY ENTRY

My dark room experiences have been good and bad. I have had moments when my full prints were fast and easy to create, as they needed the same time, aperture, and filter (if there was any) that the images had on the contact sheet. On the other hand, my bad experience was when I attempted burning for one of the full prints. It took a while, as it was difficult and complicated to do.

I have gotten more experienced at using lighting, aperture, and so forth when taking the pictures with my camera. I am ready for the next part of the lighting project, and have some images I can use for it as well.

THEORY NOTES

Lighting is one of the most important topics for photography. Soft lighting and hard lighting are two different types, and use different lamps, requiring different apertures from the camera as well.

For hard lighting, small lights are used that cast hard shadows around the object. The contrast between the shadows and the object is high when this happens, and its effect is that the viewer’s attention is drawn to particular objects in the photo.

For soft lighting, bigger lights are used. The bigger lights shine light over a bigger area, so that the intensity of the light is lower. The shadows are decreased, so the contrast between different parts of the image lowers and the viewer’s attention becomes more generalized.

IMAGE BANK

Amano Takashi is a Japanese landscape photographer. He was born in Japan in 1954 and has been involved in photography since 1975, when he began his trips around the world visiting tropical rainforests to take pictures of. Many of his photos have to do with soft lighting, as there are almost always clouds covering the sun in his landscape photos. The clouds act as filters and diffuse the light from the sun.

http://www.amanotakashi.net/
Picture taken by Takashi of Amazon River. Soft lighting is used, which can be seen by the cloud acting as a diffusing object for the sun’s light.

Edward Weston was a renowned American photographer who was born in 1886 and died in 1958. He is considered to be one of the top masters of art of the 20^th century. The photography genres he was famous for were: landscape, nude, close-up, and natural forms. The still life part of our project deals with the same material Weston dealt with in his close-up era of photographic success, which took place between 1927 and 1930. He took close-up pictures of objects such as seashells, peppers, and cabbages. In many of these photos, hard lighting was used so that the contrast between the shadow of the object in the image and the object itself was high. This caused the effect of attention being drawn to the objects’ details.

http://www.edward-weston.com/

This is a photo taken by Weston of a mushroom. Hard lighting is used, as can be seen by the dramatic contrast between the shadows and the object.

Lukas Beck is an Austrian photographer. He was born in 1967 in Vienna. He got his first camera at the age of fifteen, and his works started getting noticed by the public at the age of twenty. Today, his photos can be found in many magazines across Europe. He is involved in journalistic, artistic, and cultural photography. His work with portraits is related to the portraiture part of my project. Beck has taken many photos of artists and performers using different lighting techniques.

http://www.lukasbeck.com/

This is a portrait of the actor Roland Dueringer. Hard lighting is used, which can be seen by the high contrast between the shadows and his face.