I saw the light

Winslow, AZ, 2023

As a landscape photographer, my images have always been about light, be it the early morning glow from the sunrise or the eerie dim of a street lamp. My fear is that in a digital age, this capturing of light is becoming a lost art. Film captures light and records it, digital copies the light and recreates it in pixelated form. No matter how many ‘mega’ pixels we use, this will always be the case. As a result, this ‘copying’ the light in a digital image is very easy to manipulate. No only that, we can add light, or take it away just as easily when it comes to a digital file.

As a young student I was taught that studio lighting should always mimic daylight. A good skill to learn growing up in the North of England where the sun often hides (although since moving to California I have never stepped foot in a studio). Like digital copying reality, the studio light also copies a reality (the sun) and creates something which may look the same, but is not. If we use one studio light and mimic the sun (one light source) we can copy what the sun does. But if we add another light we are creating something else. Now throw digital into the mix and we are suddenly very far from what is real..

Natural light can be unpredictable. It can be warm or cold, flat or contrasty, sharp or soft, and sometimes capturing it rather than copying it can be wonderful.