The Nature of Light

The Nature Of Light
by Brian D. Ratty
Pictures and Text Copyright© 2008 By Media West Home Video

I think there's a time that happens in the life of every good photographer, when you suddenly know you've gotten serious about photography. It's that special moment when you realize that you're no longer content to just take pictures - that's not good enough! Now you want to MAKE pictures. Well, when you find yourself getting up in the middle of the night so you can be on a hill side to be ready for the sunrise, then you know you're serious. Because there's magic in a sunrise; or there might be. There's that possibility that a sunrise will have that one instant in time, that moment of visual poetry, that music that's never been played before, and may never be heard in the same way again. So you're there just in case the magic is there. And you're ready. Because you know that if you want to capture the magic on film, you have to understand it. You have to know where the magic is likely to appear, and when. Most of all, you have to know how to control it. That magic is light!

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So what is this magical thing we call light? Ask a scientist, and he'll probably use precise terms. He'll say that light is that very small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that normally stimulates sight. But if you ask a visual artist, he'll probably talk about light in terms that are more emotional; terms like hard and soft, warm and cool, or even romantic. But what we see, or think we see, with our eyes, and what the camera records on film are not quite the same thing.


As Your Brain Sees	As Your Eye Sees

For instance, right now you see this picture of a sunrise, or you THINK you do. But what you're actually "seeing" is what the camera saw: Light. Nothing but the sunlight reflecting off of the scene. Your brain is telling you that the scene is a solid, three-dimensional picture, but your eye, and the camera, see the scene as two-dimensional, and, for that matter, an upside down image made up entirely of reflected light. Now I know these are not simple concepts, but they're essential to an understanding of how light works: what we photograph is reflected light. And although the function of camera and film roughly parallels the action of the eye and brain, there are many differences between a subject perceived and that same subject photographed.

Light is the energy that puts an image onto film; it's the essence of all photography. It's significant that the word "photography", which comes from the ancient Greeks, literally means "to write with light." Of course, if light is the essence of what we photograph, it's also the essence, or medium, of what we see, our sole visual link to the world.

So how do we approach light? How do we learn to understand it, control it, use it to make better pictures? First we must learn the four basic properties, or conditions, of natural light: Direction, Form - what I call "Hardness and Softness," Contrast, and Color. We'll learn how these four characteristics of light influence what we see and what we photograph. And we'll learn some ways we can creatively control light to improve our photography.

The contents of Photographic Light is copyrighted by Media West Home Video.