Exercise 4.1 Daylight

Trust me to hit this topic when it starts raining for a week. Never mind – at least it means my choice is easy – overcast sky.

Having a giant softbox of a sky reveals a truth. There’s no shadow to hide, there’s nothing to delineate depth, colours appear muted. How boring! Except it’s not. The beauty of light like this is it’s honesty, it’s the softness and the heaviness that top down light can bring (just remember to look up into it Lee) and the sense of solace, the stasis, where clouds are merged and the light is a constant murmur giving equal measure to the world below.

I studied the work of Michael Schmidt, read some interviews, watched Colbergs video on YouTube. He shot mainly in black and white but as Colberg says – actually went mainly for shades of grey with very little contrast in many of his images. Soft overcast light tends to aid that effect. In most of his images the sky is overcast and a blanket of white (or light grey) in others its missing completely. On one his books ‘Berlin Wedding’ the tonal contrast is so light that in their words ‘it looks like a xerox’. Looking at his most famous work the Waffenruhe there is a far stronger contrast to many of the images – especially the photos of people where shadows are deep where flash looks to have been used.

In the image below of this recently ploughed field you can see how the light reflects evenly on the upward facing areas of mud. There is still a strong contrast here and I’m not sure that the sky would have been completely to Scmidt’s taste (in the bottom two at least – same shot just with highlights pulled back). I did look through his book Natur which is a better reflection of my surroundings and though it’s not at all like his more urban work the images still have that ‘grey’ look about them.

You can see in schmidts black and white work just how the even light and low contrasting tones of grey effect the image. It seems to make this image harder to interpret, the reflections and the lack of contrast and the ‘messy’ growth on the bank make the viewer struggle to see the entire scene. You could describe it as unsettling.

In the above image the overcast sky is a light grey and the whitest element is actually the slide. A bright hope against an almost brutalist background of the carpark. The high f stop shows everything in focus and makes the playground look more like an exercise yard in a prison.

By actually taking the time to notice the effect of the light on objects you begin to notice what an incredible difference light can make from one minute to the next.

Compare the following two and notice how the soft light from the overcast sky envelopes the entire scene compared to the second where the sun was just starting to come out and the harsh light giving highlights off the metal and the greater contrast as shadows start to form. These differences are also evident in the histogram – during my entire shoot for this exercise I was trying to keep one eye on this so even where its skewed to one side or another this was a deliberate choice – probably the first time I’ve shot like this and I found it really useful.

In the final shots for this exercise I’ve included shots that I think best convey the positive effect of this blanketing light. They are all manual though I have included one shot from my phone that I took because the pool of light on the river that lit up some fallen branches. You can see in this image an almost high contrast effect , no shadows, no dark tones, everything laid bare before the light.

Bibliography

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