Types of Light

Flash Heads

These tend to have a very harsh light and thererfore tend to be used with a soft-box (as shown below) in order to diffuse and soften the light’s intensity.

Continuous Lighting

Rembrandt Lighting

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was a Dutch painter born in 1606. The style of lighting used in modern photography named after uses shadows to create a small triangle under the eye of the subject. This is shown in his portraits – most significantly his self-portraits (one is shown below)

In modern photography this style of lighting is commonly used and creates a sense of drama and intensity within the image.

Butterfly Lighting

Named as such because of how the shadow falls, butterfly lighting is widely used in fashion photography and shows a butterfly shaped shadow under the nose and sometimes across the cheeks of a persons face.

The light points directly on the subjects face from a high vantage point as to create the desired shadow. The diagram below shows this:

Like I said before, this technique is predominantly used in fashion photography mainly because it is very difficult to do out of the studio with light most likely hitting the subject from all directions and removing most shadows.

Chiaroscuro Lighting

This is an Italian term meaning ‘light-dark’ and that is simply what it is. Images using this type of lighting simply show an obvious relationship between light and dark parts of the face.

It was widely used in monochromatic cinema to create drama within silent films and is still widely used today with colour.

Before the creation of photography however, it was used in paintings and drawings to the same effect.

Back Lighting

This technique creates a silhouetted image of the subject for the camera. The light is positioned behind the subject with a ‘snoot’ connected to it. This controls the beam of light and ensures there is no glare in the final image by keeping the beam of light from completely engulfing the subject.

Experiments

Exposure Bracketing is a technique where you take 3 or more photographs of the same thing, all at different exposures; the ideals being: one correctly exposed, one under-exposed, and one over-exposed.

When taking photographs, you have to balance the dynamic ranfge of your camera, what settings you are using, and how you camera is metering the scene. Therefore, exposure bracketing become the simpler option to get a correct exposure for your image.

How to take Bracketed Exposures

You can manually take the bracketed exposures by setting up your camera normally. Then after taking your first shot, adjust the shutter speed, aperture or ISO to one stop above and take a second shot. After that, adjust your settings to one stop below the original and take a third. You now have three identical images, each with different exposures that you can later combine when editing.

The images below show the different exposure stops.

Experiments

The final stage of presenting your photographs is by mounting them in a stylistic way. You can either mount them on foam board where the images sit on a piece of foam and actively pop out towards you; or create a window mount where the images have a clear and defined border.

Foam Board

To mount on foam board, you must spray your image with glue so it is able to stick to the board. From there you can cut the foam board down to the size of your image to create a crisp, sharp edge.

Window Mount

To create this effect; you must measure the size of your image and take 0.5cm form each measurement to allow the image to be seen but not fall through the mount. Draw the outline of your image using your final measurements then use a bevel cutter to remove the centre of the mountboard. This creates the final window for your image to be seen through.

Photomontage is the combing of two or more images to create something completely new and unique. The two ways to do this are through analogue or digital techniques.

Analogue Photomontage

Analogue techniques are used to combine images by hand using a knife/scissors, your hands and glue etc. For example, you could tear up an image and stick parts of it onto another to create a rough and damaged effect. You can then take a photo of your final outcome and re-print it to create a perfect undamaged image.

Digital Photomontage

Digital techniques combine images using software like Adobe Photoshop. These images can look similar to analogue photomontages but they eliminate the mess and retaking of the image when finished.

• A photomontage is a collage constructed from photographs.
• Historically, the technique has been used to make political statements and gained popularity in the early 20th century (World War 1-World War 2)
• Artists such as Raoul Haussman , Hannah Hoch, John Heartfield employed cut-n-paste techniques as a form of propaganda…as did Soviet artists like Aleksander Rodchenko and El Lissitsky
• Photomontage has its roots in Dadaism…which is closely related to Surrrealism

When taking photos in the lighting studio, I have used to types of lighting so far: continuous lighting and flash-heads.

Continuous lighting uses a light that is always on and used as the main source of light for the photo. In the photographs that I have taken, there is a back light used underneath the objects on the product table.

Flash-heads connect to the camera via a flash trigger so when the photo is taken, they flash and create a photo with little or no shadows in it (as shown below).

David Campany’s book ‘On Photographs’ describes the specifics of photography within specific photographs. He mentions how each photo “belongs wherever it is placed” and that means that images are everywhere in society; wall, page, screen, wherever it can be seen. If a photo has no audience, it does not exist.

Campany’s book raises three questions when reading:

1) What shapes our response to photography?

2) Where does the meaning we ascribe to it come from?

3) And how important to our reading of it are the photographer’s intentions?

ONE

In my mind, responses to photography tend to be shaped by how the image looks. However, subconsciously people are drawn to different images by how they make them feel. Simple images like those of the sun or of fire can create a sense of warmth or happiness within its audience or even fear and hatred. Every person will have a different connection to the image and it will depend on the emotions that each person will have at the time when they first see it.

TWO

When we think of photography, we think of it as a way of documenting everything that we never want to forget, be it a memory or aspect of history. However, it is so much more than that. Photography is a way to express yourself through the visual aid of colours, lights etc. It’s still a form of documentation but through the manipulation of the photos it becomes an art form with endless possibilities.

THREE

Essentially, the photographers intentions are very important as a way to aid their audience in how to feel about the image and to properly understand what the photographer could be attempting to communicate through their work. However, I personally like to guess what the photographer wants to illustrate without any information first. This allows me to decide my own opinions of the image without any influence and to establish my own personal connection.

Campany states in his book that “photographs confuse as much as fascinate, conceal as much as reveal, distract as much as compel. The are unpredictable communicators.” I originally had no clue as to what he was trying to say, but when I attempted to apply this theory when looking at an image it makes sense.

Take this for example:

This is the image labelled “The Press Conference” taken on June 9th 2008 by photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. They were photographers that connected themselves with the British Army in Helmand Province in the Afghan War. They arrived during the deadliest month of the war and endured 4 days of fatalities until the fifth day, ‘The Day Nobody Died’. After this there were different aspects of military life that a photographer would document, but they instead unrolled 6m of photographic paper that they had taken with them and exposed it to the sun for 20 seconds. The part of their results shown was named as “The Press Conference” as part of an exhibition titled “The Day Nobody Died”.

At first glance, it doesn’t look like anything other than a load of colours, which in my opinion is quite ‘confusing’. The image itself ‘conceals’ its true meaning from its audience. However, it ‘distracts’ a person from their surroundings almost absorbing all space in their mind for thought. It truly is an unpredictable communicator, as once the audience is provided with the photographers intentions behind the photo, then all is clear. With the knowledge provided it is to my belief that the photo shows the insignificance of a simple press conference within the midst of a war, as compared to other aspects. In a normal’ western’ society, being involved in a press conference could seem like a big deal but soldiers have to deal blood, gore and the constant fear that they could die at any moment. Therefore this image reveals a lot more than you would originally think.

Importing Images

To import images to Adobe Lightroom Classic, first click import in the bottom left-hand corner of your screen. You can then select the photos that you wish to upload to the server. Once chosen click import and you can begin work on your photographs. But first, you should keep yourself organised by creating a collection to separate all your photos into categories.

Collections

Click on the ‘+’ sign next to ‘Collections’ on the left of your screen, and choose ‘create collection’. Type in the name that you wish to call this and click create. From there, you can move your selected photos into the collection and know exactly where to find them in the future. If you want to transfer all of your photos to a collection, you can use ‘ctrl + A’ and drag them from there.

Library + Quick Develop

When you first begin to edit photos you can start in the library mode. Here you can click on the ‘Quick Develop’ menu and change the brightness of the photo, the white balance, and the tone; adapting the exposure, shadows, clarity etc. In the top right-hand corner you can see the levels of light intensity (ISO), focal length, aperture, and shutterspeed used to take the original photo. The Library is also where you can change which photo you are working on and decide on favourite photos in the gallery view.

Develop

In the ‘Develop’ window, you can edit your photos with more detail. Again using sliders to adjust White Balance, Exposure, Contrast and other tone controls in the basic panel; however, you can also use refining tools such as Red Eye correction and Spot Healing. Using the history panel, you can review the adaptations you have made or revert to previous settings if you prefer other edits. You can also create presets as a way to quickly make adjustments or recreate your work with other images.

When talking about the aperture of a photograph, a photographer would describe it as the opening in a lens’ diaphragm that allows the passing of light into the camera that would then hit. Aperture is calibrated in f/stops (as shown below); smaller f/stops (f1.4 / f2) means that the photographer has a larger exposure, making the image bright, whereas larger f/stops (f11 / f16) allow a smaller exposure creating a darker image. Each f-number represents one “stop” of light. A stop is a mathematical equation determining the amount of light allowed into the lens.

Aperture also effects the depth of field in photos. Depth of Field (DOF) is how much of the image is in sharp focus. A shallow DOF is when the foreground is in focus, and a deep DOF is when the entire photo is in focus, as shown below. Different DOFs allows the camera to take more interesting images rather than simple, sharp-focused images.

My Photos experimenting with Aperture and Depth of Field

In the first image, you can clearly see that the front and left of the picture is in focus with the rest out of focus, demonstrating a shallow depth of field. Whereas, the second photograph shows a deep depth of field where the entire image is in focus.

ISO determines the brightness of an image, if you increase your ISO then your image will get brighter. However if your ISO is too high your image could be very grainy, or noisy. Therefore, you should only change your ISO if you can’t make your image any brighter using the aperture and shutter speed.

White balance (WB) is the balancing of colours to try and make the image as natural as possible. Our brains automatically adapt WB so that what see seems natural. However, the camera picks up what the actual colours of the scene are, making the images potentially become very blue or orange depending on the warmth or coolness of the image. You can change the WB on your camera by changing the different values of colour warmth manually, or by using the different pre-sets on the camera to automatically adapt the image to the correct WB. However, this is only required when shooting JPEG images. Instead, you could shoot RAW images allowing you to change the WB later using post-processing software like Lightroom.

The table below shows the values of different colour temperatures, measured in units of Kelvin.