Tempestuous Child

Volume Two, Issue 5

Index

Light¹ is the one thing you have to understand if you want to take photographs well. The very word photography can be translated as "painting with light." And yet, it's too easy to take it for granted, especially with modern phone cameras; the multitude of settings and options let the photographer disregard the available light and instead use a preset to compensate for it. Too little light, the camera will adjust. Too much light, the camera will adjust. The wrong kind of light...you get the idea.

And, for the most part, this is by design: the software responsible for putting your images together in the camera are designed to correct and account for the blandest and greyest light available leaving the photographer to concentrate on capturing the moment without worrying about whether they will actually be able to capture it.²

This is all a bit different from my salad days. My first serious camera was a Pentax K-1000. It is currently sitting in a dry box under my desk and still works flawlessly even though it's coming up on 50 years old³. Learning to use it remains one of my fonder memories from high school. But even then, I didn't really focus on the light. I tended to follow the "sunny 16 rule"⁴ which is to set your camera at f/16 with an ISO of 100, your shutter speed should be 1/100 of a second. As long as it's sunny out, those settings will work pretty well.

It wasn't until I started traveling more that I had to really start changing those settings. And with the cost of film and development in those days⁵ every mistake was a painful lesson indeed.

But, over the years, I've fallen back into the habit of using settings that I know will work (or, worse, using auto-settings) and just not really thinking about it. And that's one of the things I wanted to change through this project and, so far, I've been pretty successful at doing so. At least I have been with my "proper" cameras.

Last week, I spent most of my shooting time on my phone because of the weather, among other factors. And I didn't really play with the settings very much. Just did the point-and-shoot routine. Focused on composition rather than light.

This week, I wanted to change that, so I tried to get photos that showcased the available light in some way. Some interplay of shadows and rays, sunsets and golden hours, where I would need to adjust the settings on my phone camera to get the picture I wanted. Some were easier to adjust than others.

In particular, I love the iPhone's Portrait Mode which forces a blurred background on every subject⁶. It also allows the user to choose from several lighting presets, Natural light, studio light, contour light, etc., each of which is designed to create a particular effect. I like some of them more than others.

But I challenged myself this week to pay attention to the settings on my phone's camera while I was outside and to really examine the light I was seeing. I'm not sure how successful I was in capturing something new or in finding stories to tell, but it was good to start the week with a goal, with a theme to aim for. I think I may try to continue in that vein for a while.

Here are this week's notes:

• 29 July 2022 - "Here's Looking at You" - I love frogs. They're fascinating to watch and they eat mosquitoes. What's not to love? And where I live, as the summer moves on, the frogs are coming out in droves, eating all the mosquitoes and flies. As they get bigger, they lose some of their fear and remain still long enough for me to get close enough to photograph them.

• 30 July 2022 - "Sunset" - So much artifacting in this photo. Still, it was one of my first attempts to actually get the sun in the sunset with an iPhone, so, call it a learning experience and move on?

• 31 July 2022 - "Just a Little Tire" - I was really pleased with this one. The tires are there to...I don't know. They're balanced across a small irrigation canal, by whom and for what purpose, I have no idea. But I loved the lighting I was able to get in this photo. For the curious: iPhone 11, Portrait Mode, Studio Lighting, turn the phone upside down.

• 1 August 2022 - "Flowers" - Flowers in direct sunlight can be hard to photograph because the colors are deceptively easily washed out. It's not that hard to get a single flower, but capturing a field or spread runs the risk of having isolated blobs of color against a green backdrop. Adding shadows to that can make the flowers really stand out as they are contrasted between those in the light and those in the dark.

• 2 August 2022 - "Vending" - The trick here was to balance the lights from the vending machines against the background. Push too hard one way or another and either the vending machines wash out or the background goes dark. Also, vending machines are always a strange kind of photo. Especially ones with no one at them.

• 3 August 2022 - "Pumpkin" - Here I was trying to use light to make the foreground green contrast against the background green. Also, I love that these pumpkins are just growing in an empty lot. No idea if someone planted them on purpose, but the entire lot is overgrown and abandoned so I like to think it was just some Johnny Pumpkinseed passing through that planted the seeds here.

• 4 August 2022 - "Rain Path" - This is the least successful photo this week; this is a drainage path that I often use as a shortcut when I'm out walking the dog and I just couldn't get a good balance of foreground vs background vs sky with my phone. Not sure if I need to go deeper into the settings or just accept that there are somethings phones can't do. Yet.

For more information, to join in, or just to support the project, please follow any of the links below. Thank you.

1. This week's title comes from an old Nikon ad: "Sometimes light behaves like a wave, sometimes light behaves like a particle. Sometimes light behaves like a spoiled tempestuous child." Amen.

2. Shooting with a smartphone means you never have to look through a viewfinder only to find out that there is no possible combination of f/stop, shutter speed, ISO, and tripod that will let you get the picture.

3. Unlike, say, yours truly, who is also only a few short years away from 50 and yet working about as far from flawlessly as humanly possible.

4. My hometown of Yuma, Arizona gets clouds, but rarely what you'd call cloudy, so the rule worked pretty well.

5. Although much, much cheaper than now.

6. In photography circles, this is known as a "bokeh," a term borrowed from Japanese. What a lot of photographers don't know is that, in Japanese, boke has a homonym that can be applied to a person as a somewhat less than kind description of their character. Think something along the lines of "village idiot."