Time & Light
Commonly in both my assignment and personal work, concept and the traditional sense of beauty come into conflict. The most visually engaging version of an image may completely undercut the concept you want to illustrate. In the next few blogs my goal is to develop the idea of linking creative decision to the concept you want to illustrate. The question always lurking in the shadows with conceptual situations is as follows - IS THIS THE________ of ________? Whether we are discussing lighting, composition, aperture, point of view, propping, etc., every single one of these decisions will influence the visual impact of your image on the concept being illustrated.
Specific to this blog, the goal is to explore how lighting decisions can be linked to conceptual outcomes. In the case of the two clusters of photos in this blog the questions being posed are as follows:
IS THIS THE LIGHTING OF a Common Erosional/Chemical Process?
IS THIS THE LIGHTING OF Death/Deterioration/Desiccation?
The first photo we want to discuss is the small typology above of pitted sandstone, Tafoni, from up on the North Coast near the Russian River by Jenner, CA. While only six photos are in the cluster above, the actual size of this typology is about 100+ images. The whole cluster was photographed in February 2016 over a three day period. The conceptual goal here was to show how varied this erosional process is in visual result. Same rock, but never the same outcome! To this end, I decided to work in a very uniform system where composition, distance from subject, lens type and depth of field were held steady.
I was less clear where to take the lighting, so the first day I did two light tests the last hour of the day; direct end of day warm soft light, and shadow light facing away from the sun. Both the introduction of open shadows and warm lighting made for more affective individual images, however it subtracted from being easy to read when the images were gridded out. Accordingly, the whole project was shot in the shade, on cloudless days, the last hour and a half of the day. In this way, we had consistent lighting that easily lent itself to comparing the geometric variation from image to image.
The second photo cluster I want to discuss is the dried gingko leaf above. The goal here was to illustrate how the drying of the leaf really accentuates the almost skeletal like internal structure, but also the subtle variation in color as the leaf became desiccated. To this end, rather than lighting flat like the Tafoni images, I decided to side light so the individual ribs in the leaf stand out and cast subtle shadows. In doing so, the skeletal aspect of the leaf is emphasized. If lit in a more open way like the first photo above, the tonal shifts would be apparent, but the shift in surface texture, and actual thinning of the leaf would have been downplayed. This is easily seen in the second image above.
Needless to say, if our side lighting had been more contrasty and dramatic, we might have created a graphically more engaging image, but the tonal variations in the leaf would be somewhat disrupted and downplayed as we can see in the third gingko photo in our cluster.
