**Understanding Light and Its Impact on Photography**

With available light, the first thing we need to do is a bit of a deep dive and discovery into what light is going to do through a window during the day. I'm going to refer you back to Sue Deck on this. If you look at these images that he did, they are very deliberate; they're very incorporated. He didn't just set up and go on any of these. The light is such a key element in these. He was definitely working with the specific time of the day knowing what the light was going to do.

Of course, these were in his home studio, so it was a location that he was very familiar with. Just it's kind of similar to how I work when I do these videos. I have this big window over here and I know what the sun's could do and I know what times are not good to record. I know how to adjust for it. So, and so forth. It's the same concept we're going to apply to photography.

We got to know what the light is going to do, so what I would do is pick one location in your house that you feel is suitable for a shooting. Let's say still-lifes or portraits. You have a little bit of room to work. I realized that some of you may have a lot of window options that would not go crazy. I would pick one because it's going to be just be easier to keep track of, some of you don't have as many window options and so well your works cut out for you we're gonna have to deal with what we've got.

It's going to be dependent too on if you live in a very dark place you're probably going to only have a few hours that you have adequate light to actually shoot in. I would also look for the opposite when you're gonna have really hard light coming in a window because it's going to behave completely different now. You should be able to get great images out of any situation, and so that we're gonna get into that as we go.

**Documenting Light Throughout the Day**

The first exercise here what I want you to do is we're gonna pick a window and I want you to document this throughout the entire day of daylight hours every hour. This may seem a little extreme, you might want to leave a tripod setup if you want to shoot a subject, if that is making you feel like you're accomplishing something that's fine too. Or you could just document the space because what we're looking at for this very first part of this is I just want everybody to understand what your light is doing throughout the day.

So that way we can get a better handle and we can predict it at least for the time being when the seasons change, light does different things too. And so these are things to be aware of, and I think this is also has a foot in the world of landscape photography because landscape photography is not just set up and go - sometimes it can be but you're normally reacting to the surroundings you have in the environment that you have in the lighting conditions that you have or if you have a shot in mind, you need to know what the lights doing during that time of day.

So we're gonna keep this very controlled. So this is just part one, we're obviously going to be working into doing still-life images and we're going to do a lot with composition when we get into those. And I also want to do some stuff with portraits but those are gonna be later on down the line with photos sentence right now we need to document and we need to find out what the light is doing, I know this is kind of slow and meditative to begin with.

But I think this is a great place to start. So there's no images to submit or anything yet again, I want to make sure that we're all learning on this, this is the goal right now is to actually get this under your hat not to just show off in the internet so there'll be time for that. I promise.

You know what I would do is you can set up a tripod. You can get a camera, try to shoot from same angles or maybe you can explore different angles but you just need some record that you can refer to using Lightroom or whatever photo editor that you're using just to group your images. You can use Adobe bridge if you want use a folder of images but we need to be able to see what it's doing throughout the day.

That way, you know okay if I want this type of shot, this is when I can go get it so that's our start let me know what you guys think drop me a comment below. I'm going to be working through these with you so expect to see some videos throughout the week where I'm actually bringing this up and showing you what I'm doing with this.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis video is brought to you by Squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business welcome back everybody I am super excited a because this is going to be the first in our new series of photo Symonds for 2020 now these are gonna be a little bit different than the way I did them before if you participate when I did them about a year ago or so in that series what we would do is they were more like challenges with instruction involved so I would have one video where there's some instruction and then there would be kind of this challenge involved people would submit their images that would share them so on and so forth this time around we're gonna take a little bit more of a deep dive into this and I think we're gonna get used to a lot of learning I think this is really gonna be a fun process so this first part we're gonna be talking about is going to be about available light now this will progress we're gonna do some exercises around available light we're gonna really do some exploration this week and then there's going to lead into still life work and then some portrait work as well now you can start by doing still lives if you want to them and explain the assignment in a second but I want to talk first a little bit about available light I have done videos before on W Eugene Smith who was one of my favorite photographers kind of a funny story so he used to get asked quite often do you ever use available light in other words people thought that all he did was using a flash of course he did a lot of different kinds of things and he was always answering of course they use available light I use a flash I use a window I use whatever's available knee-slapping hilarious I realize but I bring that up because understanding how light works is kind of universal whether you're using natural light or whether you're using artificial light I want to draw your attention to several photographers in this video who used a lot of available light or window light in composing their images the first one and I will put a list of all these books there's some three of them in the show description or if you just want to look at some online resources I'll supply you guys with some links as well but this is a Czech photographer his name is Joseph Sudak he was very well known often referred to by his nickname as the poet of Prague he did a wide range of work but he's also known for doing these still lifes in his home studio in this big atrium window so I want to begin with Sudak because what I want you to see in these images is that every time he photographed it was all done deliberately playing with light is the subject usually now I know these are still lives in it might be a glass of water or it might see something with a flower in it but I think that the subject really in these photos is light and you can see how there's different scenarios in which he's using light how it interacts with objects there's a lot of stuff that he did refraction and reflection and things when you have water involved in a glass very simple setups but very interesting images now what's interesting about this is that I mentioned that what we're gonna be doing is a lot of work from home right now that if you can start to understand concepts this will scale up and I think you see this in su decks work as well when it scales up light is always a key component of these images one of my favorite photos that he did that has a great atmospheric look to it was actually executed by getting light to pass through dust and so basically he and his assistants we're basically stirring up as much dust as possible to get this look but anyway I think there's a direct relationship by what you see with the more subtle smaller still lives and what you see with the larger scale outdoor architectural environmental type images and as we get into using available light we will get into doing still lifes and this is a great book to check out I'm a big fan of artist monographs like this one which is just a career compendium because I think there's just so much you can learn here much more than kind of an instruction manuals so these are all books I highly recommend I realize and I've done this my entire career of making videos when I show books people watch these later the books are out of stock and so sometimes that happens but I'll give you some online resources too because these images are pretty well known and not too hard to dig up but anyway that's Joseph su deck I also want to bring up one of the first photographers this is Henry Fox Talbot this is a collection called first photographs he's widely printed it's pretty easy to get a hold of his work Henry Fox Talbot was one of the early guys a lot most of you know that the first photograph was necessarily Epps who was a French scientist and that is the oldest surviving photograph there were other people at that time trying to develop a fixed image on paper he's just the one that survives that we know today as being the earliest but there were two individuals later who brought photography into the commercial realm but basically made it available to all the most famous is probably Louis Daguerre second would be Henry Fox Talbot both of them were working around the same time Louis his recipe out first and so he kind of gets a lot of the credit but I think Henry Fox Talbot for me is a much more interesting photographer because he was also a wannabe artist at least he used to say that he was very open about the fact that he couldn't draw and he wanted to be able to make art but by using a camera or a lens or some kind of chemical process to make that work or that image fixed on paper so it's a very different perspective but what's cool is when you look at these now these are really early photographs some of them are just photograms they're an object that's just exposed to light on paper like lace or even leaves and what's interesting is he had no point of reference there were no photographers really that came before him there's no body of work Photography was not a quote-unquote art form it's not something you would see in museums there was nothing that existed so he's literally working from nothing into an artistic medium the second thing that's really important than understanding Talbot is that the papers and the materials they were using back then were not very light sensitive you know today when we talk about ISO or its gain on a digital camera we have enormous range in the fact that we can shoot using very fast shutter speeds in very low light sometimes pretty much near darkness with very little light in the scene that was not the case with this early stuff it had to be done outdoors it had to have long exposures sometimes several seconds sometimes longer and so it's a very different process and so light is an integral component to that the other cool thing about Talbot is I know that these are very low dynamic range they're very low fee images their salt prints is what a lot of these are but what we see is actually a work that's treated as an object these weren't reproduced by the tons they were done one-offs and they all have a specific tone or color to them and I think that's what makes them very fascinating some of these deep reds some of them are Sienna type blue types of things I think that they have you have to consider these not only if the photo that they represent but also as an object and that's important as we go through - it's important to print your work it's important to treat images not just as stuff that I did on the camera today but is trying to achieve a specific desired result that ends as a work of art and finally I want to give you somebody any more modern context this is one of my favorites I've talked about it many times in these videos over the years this is Tom Burrell you have to meet Tom about year ago which was kind of cool that was like a really wild moment I was really nervous and he's just he's the man anyway Tom got his start as a printer he was Robert Mapplethorpe sprinter and did a lot of Roberts major works during the height of his career anyway in about the 90s he started doing his own works and what I loved about Tom Burrell is he has this nod to the past this respect for the history that came before but he doesn't with any modern context now one of the things that he loves doing is he refers to it just his tabletop photography but I think of it is still life photography and again just like sudoc when you understand lighting principles and when you understand subtleties and how to bring that out this also translates into large-scale works one of my favorites in this book is an image that he did a whole set of images he did on New York City but this one in particular was taken from an empty office space but it still gives you context it works with light I just think it's a great picture the other cool thing about Barela and some of my favorite pieces of his are very simple there with items you can find in a grocery store like these pears this is one of my favorites because it's very even lighting this by the way was done with a pinhole camera so this is probably indoors I would say it's probably about a 45-minute an exposure but it works with light he was using Polaroid type 55 film which had a really low ISO rating of 50 and anyway some really awesome work this book is almost near impossible to find this was printed some of you might remember a record label called 4ad who did Cocteau twins and a couple other bands anyway for Haidee the guy who ran that record label was a big photography fan and they wanted to go into doing books and they only did a few I believe there were two and this is one of them so it's very difficult to find but he was very widely representing galleries during top and I'm talking about Tom during his career and you can pretty easily find those on the internet so I'll give you some links to those as well so now that we have some context here I want to get into the assignment portion of what we're going to be working with this week when we talk about available light and so there is going to be some exercises we're going to do I want to explain those but first of all I wanna give a quick shout-out to our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at squarespace.com present your photography using squarespace's modern professional portfolios the layouts are completely customizable and you can use squarespace's drag and drop based back-end system which is really to use to present your work the way that you want it seen Squarespace is an all-in-one platform for building beautiful websites easily claiming your domain or URL and creating a custom site that brings your ideas to life Squarespace is host to a number of other tools including ecommerce appointment scheduling and analytics so that you can grow your brand and your following so head over to Squarespace calm for a free trial and when you're ready to launch you can go to Squarespace calm slash AOP to save an additional 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain once again that is Squarespace com / AOP and I want to thank the folks at Squarespace for sponsoring another episode of the art of photography so in working with available light the first thing we need to do is a bit of a deep dive and discovery into what light is going to do through a window during the day I'm going to refer you back to sue deck on this if you look at these images that he did these are very deliberate they're very incorporate he didn't just set up and go on any of these the light is such a key element in these he was definitely working with the specific time of the day knowing what the light was going to do of course these were in his home studio so it was a location that he was very familiar with just it's kind of similar to how I work when I do these videos I have this big window over here and I know what the sun's could do and I know what times are not good to record I know how to adjust for it so and so forth it's the same concept we're going to apply to photography so we got to know what the light is going to do so what I would do is pick one location in your house that you feel is suitable for a shooting let's say still-lifes or portraits you have a little bit of room to work I realized that some of you may have a lot of window options that would not go crazy I would pick one because it's going to be just be easier to keep track of some of you don't have as many window options and so well your works cut out for you we're gonna have to deal with what we've got and so that's going to be really important it's going to be dependent too on if you live in a very dark place you're probably going to only have a few hours that you have adequate light to actually shoot in and I would also look for the opposite when you're gonna have really hard light coming in a window because it's going to behave completely different now you should be able to get great images out of any situation and so that we're gonna get into that as we go so the first exercise here what I want you to do is we're gonna pick a window and I want you to document this throughout the entire day of daylight hours every hour so this may seem a little extreme you might want to leave a tripod setup if you want to shoot a subject if that is making you feel like you're accomplishing something that's fine too or you could just document the space because what we're looking at for this very first part of this is I just want everybody to understand what your light is doing throughout the day so that way we can get a better handle and we can predict it at least for the time being when the seasons change light does different things too and so these are things to be aware of and I think this is also it has a foot in the world of landscape photography because landscape photography is not just set up and go - sometimes it can be but you're normally reacting to the surroundings you have in the environment that you have in the lighting conditions that you have or if you have a shot in mind you need to know what the lights doing during that time of day so we're gonna keep this very controlled so this is just part one we're obviously going to be working into doing still-life images and we're going to do a lot with composition when we get into those and I also want to do some stuff with portraits but those are gonna be later on down as we go down the line with photos sentence right now we need to document and we need to find out what the light is doing I know this is kind of slow and meditative to begin with but I think this is a great place to start so there's no images to submit or anything yet again I want to make sure that we're all learning on this this is the goal right now is to actually get this under your hat not to just show off in the Internet so there'll be time for that I promise right now we are documenting so we are documenting what light is doing in the window throughout the day so what I would do is you can set up a tripod you can get a camera try to shoot from same angles or maybe you can explore different angles but you just need some record that you can refer to using Lightroom or whatever photo editor that you're using just to group your images you can use Adobe bridge if you want use a folder of images but we need to be able to see what it's doing throughout the day that way we know okay if I want this type of shot this is when I can go get it so that's our start let me know what you guys think drop me a comment below I'm going to be working through these with you so expect to see some videos throughout the week where I'm actually bringing this up and showing you what I'm doing with this I'll catch you guys in the next video until then laterthis video is brought to you by Squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business welcome back everybody I am super excited a because this is going to be the first in our new series of photo Symonds for 2020 now these are gonna be a little bit different than the way I did them before if you participate when I did them about a year ago or so in that series what we would do is they were more like challenges with instruction involved so I would have one video where there's some instruction and then there would be kind of this challenge involved people would submit their images that would share them so on and so forth this time around we're gonna take a little bit more of a deep dive into this and I think we're gonna get used to a lot of learning I think this is really gonna be a fun process so this first part we're gonna be talking about is going to be about available light now this will progress we're gonna do some exercises around available light we're gonna really do some exploration this week and then there's going to lead into still life work and then some portrait work as well now you can start by doing still lives if you want to them and explain the assignment in a second but I want to talk first a little bit about available light I have done videos before on W Eugene Smith who was one of my favorite photographers kind of a funny story so he used to get asked quite often do you ever use available light in other words people thought that all he did was using a flash of course he did a lot of different kinds of things and he was always answering of course they use available light I use a flash I use a window I use whatever's available knee-slapping hilarious I realize but I bring that up because understanding how light works is kind of universal whether you're using natural light or whether you're using artificial light I want to draw your attention to several photographers in this video who used a lot of available light or window light in composing their images the first one and I will put a list of all these books there's some three of them in the show description or if you just want to look at some online resources I'll supply you guys with some links as well but this is a Czech photographer his name is Joseph Sudak he was very well known often referred to by his nickname as the poet of Prague he did a wide range of work but he's also known for doing these still lifes in his home studio in this big atrium window so I want to begin with Sudak because what I want you to see in these images is that every time he photographed it was all done deliberately playing with light is the subject usually now I know these are still lives in it might be a glass of water or it might see something with a flower in it but I think that the subject really in these photos is light and you can see how there's different scenarios in which he's using light how it interacts with objects there's a lot of stuff that he did refraction and reflection and things when you have water involved in a glass very simple setups but very interesting images now what's interesting about this is that I mentioned that what we're gonna be doing is a lot of work from home right now that if you can start to understand concepts this will scale up and I think you see this in su decks work as well when it scales up light is always a key component of these images one of my favorite photos that he did that has a great atmospheric look to it was actually executed by getting light to pass through dust and so basically he and his assistants we're basically stirring up as much dust as possible to get this look but anyway I think there's a direct relationship by what you see with the more subtle smaller still lives and what you see with the larger scale outdoor architectural environmental type images and as we get into using available light we will get into doing still lifes and this is a great book to check out I'm a big fan of artist monographs like this one which is just a career compendium because I think there's just so much you can learn here much more than kind of an instruction manuals so these are all books I highly recommend I realize and I've done this my entire career of making videos when I show books people watch these later the books are out of stock and so sometimes that happens but I'll give you some online resources too because these images are pretty well known and not too hard to dig up but anyway that's Joseph su deck I also want to bring up one of the first photographers this is Henry Fox Talbot this is a collection called first photographs he's widely printed it's pretty easy to get a hold of his work Henry Fox Talbot was one of the early guys a lot most of you know that the first photograph was necessarily Epps who was a French scientist and that is the oldest surviving photograph there were other people at that time trying to develop a fixed image on paper he's just the one that survives that we know today as being the earliest but there were two individuals later who brought photography into the commercial realm but basically made it available to all the most famous is probably Louis Daguerre second would be Henry Fox Talbot both of them were working around the same time Louis his recipe out first and so he kind of gets a lot of the credit but I think Henry Fox Talbot for me is a much more interesting photographer because he was also a wannabe artist at least he used to say that he was very open about the fact that he couldn't draw and he wanted to be able to make art but by using a camera or a lens or some kind of chemical process to make that work or that image fixed on paper so it's a very different perspective but what's cool is when you look at these now these are really early photographs some of them are just photograms they're an object that's just exposed to light on paper like lace or even leaves and what's interesting is he had no point of reference there were no photographers really that came before him there's no body of work Photography was not a quote-unquote art form it's not something you would see in museums there was nothing that existed so he's literally working from nothing into an artistic medium the second thing that's really important than understanding Talbot is that the papers and the materials they were using back then were not very light sensitive you know today when we talk about ISO or its gain on a digital camera we have enormous range in the fact that we can shoot using very fast shutter speeds in very low light sometimes pretty much near darkness with very little light in the scene that was not the case with this early stuff it had to be done outdoors it had to have long exposures sometimes several seconds sometimes longer and so it's a very different process and so light is an integral component to that the other cool thing about Talbot is I know that these are very low dynamic range they're very low fee images their salt prints is what a lot of these are but what we see is actually a work that's treated as an object these weren't reproduced by the tons they were done one-offs and they all have a specific tone or color to them and I think that's what makes them very fascinating some of these deep reds some of them are Sienna type blue types of things I think that they have you have to consider these not only if the photo that they represent but also as an object and that's important as we go through - it's important to print your work it's important to treat images not just as stuff that I did on the camera today but is trying to achieve a specific desired result that ends as a work of art and finally I want to give you somebody any more modern context this is one of my favorites I've talked about it many times in these videos over the years this is Tom Burrell you have to meet Tom about year ago which was kind of cool that was like a really wild moment I was really nervous and he's just he's the man anyway Tom got his start as a printer he was Robert Mapplethorpe sprinter and did a lot of Roberts major works during the height of his career anyway in about the 90s he started doing his own works and what I loved about Tom Burrell is he has this nod to the past this respect for the history that came before but he doesn't with any modern context now one of the things that he loves doing is he refers to it just his tabletop photography but I think of it is still life photography and again just like sudoc when you understand lighting principles and when you understand subtleties and how to bring that out this also translates into large-scale works one of my favorites in this book is an image that he did a whole set of images he did on New York City but this one in particular was taken from an empty office space but it still gives you context it works with light I just think it's a great picture the other cool thing about Barela and some of my favorite pieces of his are very simple there with items you can find in a grocery store like these pears this is one of my favorites because it's very even lighting this by the way was done with a pinhole camera so this is probably indoors I would say it's probably about a 45-minute an exposure but it works with light he was using Polaroid type 55 film which had a really low ISO rating of 50 and anyway some really awesome work this book is almost near impossible to find this was printed some of you might remember a record label called 4ad who did Cocteau twins and a couple other bands anyway for Haidee the guy who ran that record label was a big photography fan and they wanted to go into doing books and they only did a few I believe there were two and this is one of them so it's very difficult to find but he was very widely representing galleries during top and I'm talking about Tom during his career and you can pretty easily find those on the internet so I'll give you some links to those as well so now that we have some context here I want to get into the assignment portion of what we're going to be working with this week when we talk about available light and so there is going to be some exercises we're going to do I want to explain those but first of all I wanna give a quick shout-out to our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at squarespace.com present your photography using squarespace's modern professional portfolios the layouts are completely customizable and you can use squarespace's drag and drop based back-end system which is really to use to present your work the way that you want it seen Squarespace is an all-in-one platform for building beautiful websites easily claiming your domain or URL and creating a custom site that brings your ideas to life Squarespace is host to a number of other tools including ecommerce appointment scheduling and analytics so that you can grow your brand and your following so head over to Squarespace calm for a free trial and when you're ready to launch you can go to Squarespace calm slash AOP to save an additional 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain once again that is Squarespace com / AOP and I want to thank the folks at Squarespace for sponsoring another episode of the art of photography so in working with available light the first thing we need to do is a bit of a deep dive and discovery into what light is going to do through a window during the day I'm going to refer you back to sue deck on this if you look at these images that he did these are very deliberate they're very incorporate he didn't just set up and go on any of these the light is such a key element in these he was definitely working with the specific time of the day knowing what the light was going to do of course these were in his home studio so it was a location that he was very familiar with just it's kind of similar to how I work when I do these videos I have this big window over here and I know what the sun's could do and I know what times are not good to record I know how to adjust for it so and so forth it's the same concept we're going to apply to photography so we got to know what the light is going to do so what I would do is pick one location in your house that you feel is suitable for a shooting let's say still-lifes or portraits you have a little bit of room to work I realized that some of you may have a lot of window options that would not go crazy I would pick one because it's going to be just be easier to keep track of some of you don't have as many window options and so well your works cut out for you we're gonna have to deal with what we've got and so that's going to be really important it's going to be dependent too on if you live in a very dark place you're probably going to only have a few hours that you have adequate light to actually shoot in and I would also look for the opposite when you're gonna have really hard light coming in a window because it's going to behave completely different now you should be able to get great images out of any situation and so that we're gonna get into that as we go so the first exercise here what I want you to do is we're gonna pick a window and I want you to document this throughout the entire day of daylight hours every hour so this may seem a little extreme you might want to leave a tripod setup if you want to shoot a subject if that is making you feel like you're accomplishing something that's fine too or you could just document the space because what we're looking at for this very first part of this is I just want everybody to understand what your light is doing throughout the day so that way we can get a better handle and we can predict it at least for the time being when the seasons change light does different things too and so these are things to be aware of and I think this is also it has a foot in the world of landscape photography because landscape photography is not just set up and go - sometimes it can be but you're normally reacting to the surroundings you have in the environment that you have in the lighting conditions that you have or if you have a shot in mind you need to know what the lights doing during that time of day so we're gonna keep this very controlled so this is just part one we're obviously going to be working into doing still-life images and we're going to do a lot with composition when we get into those and I also want to do some stuff with portraits but those are gonna be later on down as we go down the line with photos sentence right now we need to document and we need to find out what the light is doing I know this is kind of slow and meditative to begin with but I think this is a great place to start so there's no images to submit or anything yet again I want to make sure that we're all learning on this this is the goal right now is to actually get this under your hat not to just show off in the Internet so there'll be time for that I promise right now we are documenting so we are documenting what light is doing in the window throughout the day so what I would do is you can set up a tripod you can get a camera try to shoot from same angles or maybe you can explore different angles but you just need some record that you can refer to using Lightroom or whatever photo editor that you're using just to group your images you can use Adobe bridge if you want use a folder of images but we need to be able to see what it's doing throughout the day that way we know okay if I want this type of shot this is when I can go get it so that's our start let me know what you guys think drop me a comment below I'm going to be working through these with you so expect to see some videos throughout the week where I'm actually bringing this up and showing you what I'm doing with this I'll catch you guys in the next video until then later\n"