Weekly Assignment: The Right Light (for You)

[PWS-Staff]

I covered a lot of ground quickly in this chapter to get you familiar with all the kinds of light that affect the color and contrast in your images. For this assignment, you get to pick the light for your subject. You can take a high- or low-contrast photo. You can take the picture indoors or outdoors, in full light or low light. It’s up to you. The only instruction is to make note of all the elements that go into the photo that you choose to upload to photoworkshop.com. What kind of light are you dealing with? Do you need to adjust the white balance? What are your shutter speed, ISO, and aperture settings? Do you have to adjust any of them to accommodate the amount of light? When you upload the photo, share with everyone all that you can about how you took your image.

I really like working with light as a reflection. So, to complete this assignment, I decided to photograph the graphic shape of the St. Louis Arch. It becomes totally different when you get a different angle and use the light and shadow to maximize the color. In this case, the Arch is in its own shadow, so it is blue, and the sky on this bright sunny day is also blue. The sun behind the arch gives a glow that separates the subject from the background. Using a wide angle lens on a compact digital camera, the exposure was ISO 200 at 1/640 second at f/7.1 with the exposure compensation set to –1/3 to really get the blue nice and rich in color.

From "Lighting," by Chris Bucher