Light And Color

 

 Hard light

Hard light is fairly simple - keep it small, and keep it distant. The sun in an empty sky is excellent, but it's perpetually gray and miserable here, so I put a flash on a light stand instead. Some ambient light is visible, but it is very flat, so the shadow is clearly defined.

In order to prevent reflections, imagine you're photographing a mirror; if you can see a reflection of your light source, you're going to get glare. As a result, I have the flash at a very steep angle to the subject - about 30 degrees, or roughly 8 o'clock. 

  Rim lighting

Rim lighting is simple: put the hard light behind the subject. The sun works well, though it does tend to overpower the scene. This one required substantial adjustment in post, courtesy of shooting RAW. You don't need a fancy camera,- this was a point-and-shoot - but it helps to keep the ISO low.

Finished product: 

Without adjustments:

Broad Light

Broad light is easy here - the sky is a uniform gray most days. You can't even tell what time it is until it abruptly becomes dark at 7 o'clock.

I was hoping to photograph the melted remains of a candlelight vigil by the lake, but someone was hunting aquatic snails and I liked the visual parallelism against the bollard. Unlike the rim light, I had to increase the contrast in post; it was substantially washed out.

Color Temperature

This headshot was illuminated by a very cheap LED with some diffusion. Cheap lights do not render color well, and render some differently than others; correct the white balance for one color, and another is washed out or totally wrong. This "Color Rendering Index" (CRI) is not to be ignored - incandescent lights are dim and hot and inefficient and cannot be dimmed without changing color, but their rendition of color is impeccable. 

In this case, I just left the bluish cast because I liked it. 

Reflected Light

This photo was the one that provided me the most difficulty. It's hard to show reflected light as reflected; without seeing the source and the  reflection, it has no context. I liked the damp sheen of the pavement and the mirror image of the puddles opposite the sky, but it honestly didn't work as well as I had hoped.