Light and Color

So far this quarter, I think I have learned a lot about my camera and photography. I came into this class with next to zero experience, so I didn’t know anything about aperture, ISO, or shutter speed. While I am far from perfect, I think I have improved my ability to create a composition. I think light is one of the hardest things for me to work with. I am happy with the progress I have made, and I know there is a lot more to continue to work on.

This week, we were focusing on composition, color, and light. I feel like I am very familiar with colors and color relationships, but working with color in photography was different. I am used to working with color after the fact in a photo editor. It was interesting how the colors changed as I adjusted different camera settings. In terms of composition, most of the quarter we have been trying to get photos that look organic instead of staged. It was a different experience to build a composition with the items I wanted and arrange them to create visual balance. Lastly, the light was the hardest to work with. When I shot the still-life pictures, it was overcast outside and I used window light. This was helpful, because I didn’t have to diffuse it, but just the set up I don’t think I ever got the correct balance of ISO and aperture to make a sharp, crisp image.

The light was difficult to work with, even though it was a soft light. In the image above, many of my objects were very reflective and the reflection of the light takes attention away from the rest of the image. Then, in Lightroom, I needed to turn the exposure up to make the background look like the light grey and white it is, but that again worsened the reflections. I probably could have done a better job with local edits to fix this, but this is what I finished with.