In an earlier post, “Frame Your World,” I talked about one common glitch I see when editing landscape photographs—careless or “gunsight” framing. Here’s another: not looking at LIGHT.

So what’s the language here? For starters, there’s front light, side light, back light, top light, low-angle light. Direct, specular, or “hard” light. Spotlighting. Rim lighting on a sunny day…and also on a cloudy day. Indirect light. Bounce light. High overcast. Fog. Blue hour light. Even moonlight!

It can be kinda fun to explore all these things and get familiar with their moods. Maybe take some long hikes, sans camera, at different times of day, and just look at light! Or, back at home, place a vase of flowers on a stool and grab a desk lamp or shop light or even a flashlight and try lighting the vase from the back, from the sides, from above, and from a very low angle, and study all those effects. Bring the lamp close and back it up. Try bouncing it off a light-colored wall or off the ceiling and onto the flowers. Use your hand to partially block it. What are you seeing? Where are the shadows? Are they hard or soft? And what about those highlights? How does the light accent or quiet the shapes of things?

This may sound like a primer for studio lighting, and indeed it is. But it’s the same thing outdoors—just on a bigger scale. And you’re not making this light—you’re reacting to it…or anticipating it. I’m always watching the sky. Which way is the sun moving? Are clouds approaching, and might they help? Where will the light be tracking in ten minutes? In four hours? Or in six weeks…or even eight months…? Learn to see—or to find—the lighting you like. (And also watch that it’s not changing while you’re fiddling with stuff!)

I was lucky, in a way, that for years I shot primarily sheet film (and there was no digital!) and “assembled” my exposures in my head, based on multiple readings from my handheld, 1-degree Pentax spotmeter. Color transparency films are very unforgiving, and that discipline makes one really look at highlights and shadows throughout a scene. Sure, the so-called “dynamic range” when shooting digital is far greater than could be jammed onto Fujichrome, and that makes exposure easier—BUT it doesn’t make the light look any better!

So the simple theme here is to not just look for things, but to first look at LIGHT…And then find something to shine it on. Your best photos may seem like miracles—and they are—but light is the love that brings them to life.

EXAMPLE: Lighting played a big role in one of my own recent images, “Backwater,” shown above. This shot was made during a fiery desert sunrise, with my tripod-mounted Sony and its 100-400 lens aimed down at an ephemeral salt pond below the ridge I was perched on. The rising sun is at my back and has not yet found the stumps and water below—but its first fiery rays have hit the hills beyond the water and out of frame, and that color is kicking back down and at me. It's the converging reflections of those bounce-lit red hills and a still-pale dawn sky that form that rippled dividing line I threaded through the shadowy, salt-encrusted stumps.

It’s all indirect, but, in fact, that bounce light on the hills is so intense that even though the sun is at my back, those hills are casting shadows that are moving towards me, not away. A minute later the direct sunlight found the tops of those twisty stumps, and this scene was gone.

By Scott Atkinson

Where’s the Light?

Into the Jungle

Grasses