P52 Week 26 – Quality of Light – Poulsbo Photographer

I cheated a little this week on my 52 week project.  Well, sort of, not really.  This weeks exercise from “The Visual Toolbox” was the studying the quality of light; as in hard light vs. soft light.

The exercise actually required that I look through past work and spend some time examining the light around me, but it didn’t specify a shooting assignment for this week.  So I had some grandiose ideas about doing some shooting in hard light and soft light and comparing the two.

Then, as I started running out of time in the week that got narrowed down to, well I have this great back door that gets beautiful indirect light in the morning and very strong direct light in the afternoon.  So maybe I could set up and edit some nice still life.

Then, as the weekend drew to a close and Monday passed, and Tuesday mid-day rolled around I still hadn’t shot.  I could see the direct sunlight starting to creep into my window early this afternoon, so I struck while the iron was hot.  I grabbed a plastic ear of corn and shot it in the in the indirect light cast from my window.  I then moved it about 6 inches to where that direct sunlight was starting to make it’s way along my floor and shot the corn again.

I didn’t edit these.  I didn’t really feel like I needed to, they so clearly and precisely illustrate the difference in quality of light.

But I didn’t feel like two lack luster shots of corn should be enough.  And the exercise did talk about looking back through your work to look at different lighting situations.  So below are two examples of these two different types of light in action.  The first is soft light.  Very soft light.  It’s an image that was taken on a very overcast day some months ago.  And the second image was take last week in the late afternoon under direct sunlight.