The Incredible Lightness of Light
Light is funky. Light is cool. Light is hot. Light is good. Light is a particle. Light is a wave. Light is essential. All true in one fashion or another and, most importantly, you can’t make a photograph without light. Light is so very cool that if you want it to behave like a wave it behaves like a wave. If you want it to behave like a particle, guess what, it can do that too. While that is not essential to our use of light in photography, it is one of those cool things that everyone should know just so you can wow your friends.
Seriously, light is the essential ingredient in photographs and how we create, use or manipulate light often determines how a photo is perceived. There is a wild variation of natural light ranging in color across the full visible spectrum on an almost daily basis. Throw in a little geometry and the right color of light and you can make a stunning photograph of a rusty gate. I love light. I love to find great light and I love to create great light. Light is the most challenging aspect of photography; therefore, light is the most satisfying aspect of photography.
You may be thinking that this is all out of place for a photojournalism blog but hold on for a minute. Photojournalism is all about light too. We don’t always get the pick of the light we shoot in. Well, to be honest, we very seldom get to choose the light we shoot in. That makes it all the more important to know how to manipulate or modify the light we are shooting in to our best advantage. I know, the purists out there are collectively retching right about now but the purists clearly don’t have to make a digital camera reproduce on newsprint which can only generously be called paper. So we will talk about being ethical with the use of light while we are talking about how to make light work for us.
Leading off then we will talk about using existing light without modification. That will satisfy the purists and maybe help them keep down their lunch. From a strictly documentary point of view, light just is what it is. If the light is good, great. If the light is bad then that too is part of the story. Believe it or not, I actually agree with this. When I am shooting in a hard news environment I am extremely reluctant to add light. When I do add light I am very judicious in the application of that light because I want the images to be as absolutely honest as possible. If you add a strobe into a hard news environment you are actually modifying the environment and presenting something to the viewers that you actually couldn’t see or you present it in a way that the reader could have never seen had they been standing there. This is even true if you are using a strobe to even out shadows in a daylight environment.
Here is reality. Most of us work in a photojournalism environment that requires our images to be reproduced in a printed medium. That puts us in a place where we are required to modify the light to some degree to get it into a range where the image can be successfully reproduced. In other words, the honesty of an image is not changed by me making enough modification of the light to present an image to the readers that reproduces like I saw it. Huh? Okay, try this. If a reader were standing beside me on a hard news assignment at noon, would the reader see heavy dark shadows under the eyes of my subject? Actually, they might see the shadows but the human brain does a wonderful job of abstracting. They would see but would not perceive. Which means that they would remember a scene that was real but had certain details modified to fit their perceptions. Heavy isn’t it?
I am not suggesting that reality is relative. Actually, I guess I am. Consider the eyewitnesses to an accident. Every person sees and reports to the police what they have seen and every one of those eyewitness accounts will be somewhat variable. Not that any of them were lying but they were all perceiving the scene from a slightly different point of view. For a photojournalist that simply means that we must be as honest as possible with what we are seeing and recording without pretending that what we are recording is the absolute reality. It is simply the reality we perceive from our point of view which we modify by lens choice, moment photographed and placement of light.
The human eye has a dynamic range that is many times what your camera can reproduce and many, many times what the printing press can reproduce. So what you are doing in recording an image is compressing an image your eye sees and your brain perceives into a range that approximates what you saw when it is printed. This sometimes requires you to modify the light to shorten the dynamic range of the image. (The dynamic range for those of you who are not familiar with this term, is basically the range of visible tones from the brightest light to the darkest dark in your scene or image.)
Now, all that said, in a documentary situation you need to be as honest as possible with the light. If you have to add light to the situation, add it from the same direction and in the same quality as the existing light. Have you ever seen the W. Eugene Smith photo of the little girl in the bath. Her mother is holding her and the scene looks totally genuine. In fact, the image is strobed. The angle of light and the quality of light mimic the light bulb in the room. It is a convincing picture to me that really nails the whole issue of the poisoning of the village these folks live in. You should also make yourself familiar with the work of Sebastia Salgado. His work is amazing and it is largely documentary. If it doesn’t move you then you might want to check you pulse.
Just to wrap this up, when you are shooting in a documentary situation modify the light as little as possible and only modify it to the extent that you are making the image more reproducable for your printing press. Use natural light whenever you can and remember when you modify light to maintain as closely as possible the light quality that you observed in the situation.
About the photos: All three images are available light only. There was not light modification at all and all three settings were documentary type situations. The top photo is of a car that crashed into a church office. D2Hs with a 17-35mm. The second photo is from a fire in Athens. I used the same combo for this image. Adding flash to a night fire/crime scene is problematic because of all the reflective tape on emergency vehicles and firefighters. You just get garish bands of wash out. The final image is from an Indian religious service in the Bankhead National Forest. It is all fire light and a sodium vapor security light in the edge of the woods.
Photos copyright Gary Cosby Jr., The Decatur Daily. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.
