Light and Dark

When being able to choose what topic we wanted to focus on for two weeks before Christmas, I chose 'Light and Dark'. I found this topic enjoyable and felt that I learnt new aspects of photography as I experimented with natural light, artificial light and using reflectors and how each reflector changed how the photo looked, for example a gold reflector made the model look brighter and warmer whereas a silver reflector created more of a cool light on the model's face and balances the light. As part of this topic, I also enjoyed being able to work with new equipment that I have not used before, such as flash connected to a camera that triggers a light, using a spot metre to get incident light readings.

Figures 1 and 2 show pages from my sketchbook showing the readings we collected as a class and how we used light to create shadows and also to get rid of them.

Figure 1

Figure 2

These next images show how we experimented with natural and artificial light as well as using reflectors.

Reflectors:

These images show our experiments with the reflectors, the one on the left shows how the face looks brighter as the gold reflector shines the light on the face and gives it a warm look. The second image shows the effect of a silver reflector which has got rid of any shadows that were created and has made the face look paler in colour.

Natural Light:

This photograph was taken using only natural light and experimenting with the different settings on the camera, to take this the white balance was set on daylight and the ISO, shutter speed and aperture were also adjusted to create the right amount of light and dark.

Artificial Light:



These images were taken using a lamp and moving it around the model to see the effect that the different positions of it would have o  her face, it shows you how important the lighting is to create the right amount of shadows and also darkness which contrasts with the lighter areas of the pictures.