The Best Photo of The Week - The Light in Photography.

To make a good photo, it generally need a few ingredients: a subject, a background in which to position it and last but not least quality light.

Quality light can be natural, but at the same time it can be the light we bring from home in our photo bag. More specifically, the light given by an external flash that we can control remotely.

I know that there are purists who prefer only natural light, but also the artificial light given by a flash is good enough, as long as we control it, qualitatively, quantitatively but especially in terms of direction. As I said, many avoid artificial light, considering that it has a poor quality, and for the most part they are right, if we think of the photos taken with flash, with deep shadows, red eyes, shiny skin. But artificial light has all these negative aspects in most cases because of the direction from which it comes. More specifically, as long as it comes from the same direction as the direction in which we photograph, as is the case with the flash on any camera, we will run into all its shortcomings.

I will talk a little more about the direction, because most of the time it decides the final result. Light inevitably produces shadows, harder or softer. Choose any time of the day, study the objects around you lit by the sun and you will notice shadows. It's normal, in fact, shadows offer three-dimensionality, especially when we try to record what we see in 3D, on a 2D medium (screen, photo paper, etc.), which is why we should learn to use them. Also, the direction of the light can highlight details from the subject we are photographing.





The direction of light is not only used in photography, in fact the well-known Dutch painter Rembrandt used a lot of light direction in the portraits he painted, positioning the subject so that the light from a window came from somewhere above 45 degrees and from the side also from 45 degrees.

His lighting scheme is so well known today, being considered a classic lighting scheme used in portrait photography.

Cannon EOS 5D Mark III
50mm ƒ/10 1/200s ISO 100
2020 Pampero.