LIGHT IN PHOTOGRAPHY: CAMERA OBSCURA

We have learned many things during our workshops, but as most of us have no idea (or not really), about photography, we started from the most basic idea:

Light is essential in photography. This words means, literally, “writing with light”.

The possibility of forming images using a little hole is not recently known, and it constitutes the base of the “camara obscura”. This is because, as light moves in straight line, rays from the superior part of the scene can get to the inferior part of the receptor screen from the interior of the camara, and opposite, forming an inverted image. This image is dark due to the fact that the hole is small. To produce a lighter picture, it is needed to get more light and make the rays converge, which means, FOCUS. This demands the use of lenses.

Obviously, we have to fix the image somewhere. If a material in which the light alters it, is exposed to an illuminated image, it will change the more where the light gets the more intensively way.

The silver salts employs in modern photograph materials solve this problem. The film is exposed to the light to initiate the darkening process. I will talk about the procedure of obtaining the photographs later.

LIGHTING

Next workshop we did was about lighting. Artificial lighting needs equipment such as diffusors, spots and flashes.

We have done 4 main exercises:

Hard light, having an only spot of light focusing on one side of the model, we measure with punctual mode the part of the model which is in light. Maintaining the measures, we take the picture and we get something like this:

If we use something to change the lighting trajectory, we obtain soft light effect. We can do it also in a cloudy day, so there are no hard shadows.

We can also play with background and silhouettes.

If we use punctual mode of measure, and measure the light of our model or subject, if there is a window with more light behind, it will appear even brighter.

If we use matrix mode of measuring light, it will appear the silhouette

This implies playing with overexposing and underexposing.