Kū i ke ao.
Be of the world. To be like the world in which one lives. Live in interdependence with all that surrounds me physically, spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually.
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Two months into this class, we now have a better idea of how to use/read our cameras and create successful images in the darkroom. We are now better equipped with the knowledge and the ability to capture what we see in the world and recreate it in a photograph. However, photography (and art) is about much more than just replicating what we see – it’s about communicating!
Now it’s our turn to inspire this thought process in other people by utilizing our knowledge of photography to purposefully create images with meaning and emotion. This project aims to make you more aware of LIGHT. As we learned in class, lighting has many different qualities that can affect the emotional pull of an image.
For this project you will find different lighting situations to illustrate different emotions and create certain feelings in your prints using your understanding of camera operations, lighting, and printing techniques. If you want a challenge, try to NOT take pictures of people’s faces to communicate emotion – we rely on facial expressions to decipher emotion, but think about how a feeling or mood can be created without a person’s face.
While shooting, look for the following lighting situations:
- Specular Lighting – strong/crisp lighting, deep shadows and bright hi lights (light on a sunny day)
- Diffused Lighting – soft/even lighting, weaker/fuzzier shadows (light on a cloudy day)
- Silhouettes – bright background, dark main subject (back-lit main subject)
You will then choose 2 pictures to print up – 1 that represents a negative emotion, and 1 to represent a positive emotion. In an effort to spread positivity and improve school culture, you have an extra credit option to print a 3rd picture to give to someone as an act of kindness – a picture that you think will spread positivity in some way. Turn in the 3rd picture in your portfolio and after I grade everything, you can give the extra print away.
AT THE END OF THIS PROJECT, STUDENTS WILL BE ABLE TO:
- identify different lighting qualities, types, directions, and situations when shooting
- recognize how different lighting situations can communicate emotion
- Analyze how one’s understanding of the world is affected by experiencing visual imagery.
WHAT TO TURN IN:
- 1 – Contact Sheet of your roll of film
- 2 – 5″x7″ prints in your portfolio
- Extra Credit option: print a 3rd picture to give away to someone to spread positivity
INSPIRATION & EXAMPLES:
- Local photographer and educator David Ulrich describes light as one of the most important things in a great photograph, saying
“Light is the currency of photography and what reveals the things of the world to our eyes and brain. Many different types of light exist in the world. Each place on earth has a distinctive quality of light. Each season has its own light, and time of day becomes an expressive element in the photographer’s hand…View the light, study its potential at all times, even when not photographing. Examine how the light plays across your feeling and senses like sounding different notes on the piano touches you in different ways. Light is the essence of photography and one of the principal expressive elements in your images. Get to know its full range of possibilities intimately.”
- Try shooting during Golden Hour to get nice angled light and interesting shadows.
National Geographic used to have great resources for different types of photography, but they were recently bought by Disney and changed how they engage with the public…itʻs annoying because they shut down a lot of internet resources, but hereʻs some images that I think have really successful lighting:
- Diffused light: Arakurayama by Takashi Nakazawa, Anton Dontsenko,
- Hard light: “klipspringers at Kokerboomkloof“, Bombali Amputee Football Association by Chris Parkes,
- Silhouette:
- Moonlight: Tim Durkan,
- Long Exposure: Heart-Shaped Road by A. Kadar
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- Silhouette – background is bright, while the main subject is dark and isolated
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- Diffused natural light – soft light and shadows spread evenly across main subject
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- Specular lighting – bright beam of light from the window, dark shadows throughout the rest of the scene
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- Diffused natural lighting – even though it looks like a bright day, the subjects are in the shade of a building, creating a softer feel
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- Diffused light from the window, but the image is printed on the darker side, to create an uneasy feel
NATIONAL CORE ARTS STANDARDS
RESPONDING – HS Proficient VA: RE.7.1.Ia – Anchor Standard 7: Perceive and analyze artistic work.
Enduring Understanding: Individual aesthetic and empathetic awareness developed through engagement with art can lead to understanding and appreciation of self, others, the natural world, and constructed environments.
- How do life experiences influence the way you relate to art?
- How does learning about art impact how we perceive the world?
- What can we learn from our responses to art?
RESPONDING – HS Proficient VA: RE.7.2.Ia
Enduring Understanding: Visual imagery influences understanding of and responses to the world.
- What is an image?
- Where and how do we encounter images in our world?
- How do images influence our views of the world?