wannabe

Sometimes in the rush of capturing memories, I forget to pay attention to the one principal ingredient of photography: Light.

It’s a serious offense, considering that photography literally means ‘writing with light’.

So during the Memorial Day holiday weekend, I set out to right that wrong. To minimize fuss with gear, I chose my 50-year-old SX 70 and some expired Impossible film. No fussing with aperture, ISO, or shutter speed - just a lot of focus on light and how I want to position my subject relative to photography’s most crucial element.

I learned to not only pay attention to moments that I want to capture, but also to how those moments coincide with where the interesting light happens to be (since I was dealing with ambient light). Should I rim my subject with light? Should I then also place them closer to a surface that then bounces that light onto the shaded portion of their profile? It was wonderful having had time to slow down and experiment with photography in that way.

But I’m far from being able to reproduce these results at will. The ultimate goal is to think of light in this way, all the time, with or without more gear, with ambient, flash, or LED lights. That’s why I am in such awe of pros like Joe McNally. McNally’s pictures are the combination of his vision, his mastery of the technical aspects of photography, as well as his artistry of shaping, controlling, directing, and communicating with light.

The journey continues…