LANDSCAPE and LIGHT | Recognizing great photographic light

[Applause] okay since the the light isn't being particularly cooperative there's a little bit of light hitting it now light just didn't quite break but it does need light I would always put light at the top of the list and then where's the light gone well as I said that the light is is really flat the light today is somewhat a little strange no right now is a little bit of light oh the light again skunked skunked it's all about the light [Music] we [Music] hey everybody I bet you can't guess what I'm talking about this week I I've been meaning to put together a video about light for for quite some time now now if you've been watching my videos from the very beginning you may have noticed that there's a common theme throughout all of the videos and that is light and usually it's me complaining about the light that it's not good enough or there's something wrong with it all you have to do is ask my partner Karen and she can tell you that I'm always fussing about the light and I I won't take a photograph because it's not quite right or whatever the thing is is that light is extremely important in photography it's kind of the universal language of photographers and I've said it before and I'll say it again now and I'll keep saying it if you really want to improve your photography then concentrate first and foremost on the light I mean that the other things are important as well subject matter composition and so on but light is key to good photography once you've kind of mastered what it is you're looking for in light then the other things will slowly come together for you I guarantee it so in this video what I'd like to talk about is the different types of light that I'm always looking for it may surprise you that many many of my images are actually taken in more subdued light I I kind of call it quiet light and that's kind of why I called my my latest website quiet light don't get me wrong I really love getting up well actually I don't love getting up early but I love I love the light early in the morning and evening light I I mean I just love it just like every other outdoor photographer out there but many many times I'll be searching for much quieter situations where the light is more subdued and I kind of want to go over those different types of light with you I could spend hours on each individual lighting condition but I'm this is just a general view for you guys to kind of if you're just starting or you're kind of wondering about light then this might be a good place to start because you know in a lot of my videos I'm always complaining about the light but I never actually tell you well what it is I'm actually looking for so that's kind of what I'm going to be covering okay before I get into the meat and potatoes of the various lighting conditions I just wanted to give you a brief history of how my career started and and why I kind of like the light that I do now has kind of been a cumulative thing over the years I actually started taking photographs professionally back in 1992 and my primary clients at that time and right up until about three years ago were gardening publications mostly magazines and over that period of time I mean I've taken thousands of images of gardens mostly private gardens my main client or the company that I worked for was Cornwall publishing and they were located in Vancouver here and they had several magazines that covers the whole of Canada and over the 20 odd years that I did work for them you know I photographed hundreds of gardens I had hundreds of images published in their magazines and I really came to love overcast light the main reason being is that that type of lighting outside in gardens was so much easier to work with than any other type of lighting I mean I enjoy morning and evening light but they can be real challenges when it comes to gardens especially back then when I was using film the color casts were very hard to get rid of the different temperatures and so on so overcast light was my friend it allowed me to photograph you know six or seven gardens in a day whereas if if it was bright sunny skies and I only photographed in the morning in the evening then I would be lucky if I got to gardens in a day and when you taken into account that say I went travel to our birder I might have forty gardens to photograph and that's not just in one city that's a whole bunch of different areas throughout Alberta you can see it became quite a large task for me so overcast skies were was just fantastic and even now I have to say that overcast days are my preferred type of lighting I find overcast skies perfect for Woodland photography forests waterfalls Gardens obviously any type of scene where you're not including a lot of the landscape in the background intimate scenes close-ups that kind of stuff I just love that type of lighting and I could work in that until the cows go home now there are different types of overcast lighting my preferred lighting by by a longshot was light overcast skies and what I mean by light you have light clouds blocking the Sun but you still have a little bit of the Sun coming through enough that it would create soft shadows and the reason why I liked shadows or still like shadows is that you you really need shadows to create depth in your in your image so overcast light by far one of my favorite lighting conditions for sure [Music] have you ever had one of those Eureka moments when you suddenly realize what you have to do to to improve on something well that was kind of the case with this photograph that I took back in 1991 I I just happened to be taking the dog for a walk one evening and noticed that the light was starting to get quite good it had been pouring with rain all day and there was a gap in the clouds right as the Sun was just going down so I rushed back to the house and grabbed my camera and I I went to a little woodlot behind my house and I managed to pull off two shots of this light coming through the woods and then that was kind of the end of the of the light now back in those days you know it wasn't digital so I took the film in and a few days later got the film back and I was just blown away by the quality of the light and the contrast in color in this photograph and to be honest with you I mean I'd love to tell you that I planned all of this but it was just a snapshot on my part I had no clue what I was doing until I actually looked at the photograph and thought to myself okay or these are the types of photographs that I want to take and that's when I kind of realized well what is it about this image that makes this one a successful one over my other images that I've taken and the first realization was light okay so light is the key you have good light and you're halfway there composition and also something a little bit interesting in this case it was the contrast in light we have warm colors in the background and then cool colors in the foreground and I kind of thought stuff okay so why is it like that what has created those contrasts in color so after a bit more thought I kind of figured well okay so the orange light is actually direct sunlight coming from the Sun whereas the leaves which are in shade are actually catching ambient light from a blue sky above and there's my contrast in color after kind of realizing that this was a great ingredient to make successful images I started looking for contrasting color and light with many many of my photographs and so I started to have more successes in my photographs because I was able to predict what the results were going to be before I actually took the photograph just by studying the light and looking at what the light was doing [Music] here's another image that has many of the similarities to the other image that I showed you so in this image we also have a contrast in color we have warm colors and cool colors now this is an older four by five image on film and from past experience I knew that I was going to come out with these colors so how did I know we have the cliff face in the background there which is in deep shadow on a bright blue sunny day so I knew from experience that if I photograph in the shade on a cloudless day everything is going to come out blue but the tree the larch here which just happened to be in fall color was getting direct light from behind so he's getting backlighting so it's just making those needles glow so contrast golden yellow needles that are backlit with a deeply shaded background and you get this wonderful contrast in color and light the other big difference between this chart and the other one that I showed you is that I'd been photographing for a few years so I knew exactly what to look for was just pure luck this image I intentionally went out looking for this type of shot in this area right I'm going to leave it there for now there are other aspects of light that I want to cover in another video down the road if you enjoyed this video please just be sure to give me a thumbs up and share and also if you have any comments about the subject that I cover today I'd love to hear about them or if there's other subjects that you would like me to cover about photography be sure to leave them in the comments below all right thanks so much so much for watching and I'll I'll see you next time all right thanks [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Adam Gibbs

Views: 32,299

Keywords: photography light, role of light in photography, what is light in photography, different types of light in p, natural light photography tutorial, outdoor natural light photography tips, landscape photography lighting, llnatural light in photography, how to take beautiful photographs, how to take a good photo, landscape photography tutorial, photography composition, adam gibbs photography, adam gibbs, light on the landscape, LIGHT and LANDSCAPE, LANDSCAPE and LIGHT

Id: r5FPkpWa6FY

Length: 13min 22sec (802 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 17 2018