As I am writing this blogpost, the topic no.1 in the world is COVID-19 pandemia and its effects on society. As a photographer, I consider myself to be an “ambulator” and most of my assignments take me outside, but I try to be a responsible person and limit my contact with other people as much as possible and this inevitably means staying at home most of the time which poses as a serious limitation to my usual MO. What does one do then?
There are many ways to spend home quarantine. One can rest, read, watch TV (which I fortunately do not own), but few are going to help me to create and improve my work, so I came up with a plan to give myself assignments, that will make me creative to stay creative, even if just by a little.
As overused as it is, saying “Repetition is the mother of all learning“ is one way to approach this problem and so I went back to basics of studio work. One can read and see a lot of materials online, even perhaps remember classes at the academy, but I wanted to actually practice and repeat those basics myself (including mistakes), so I pulled the light case out of my basement, set up a simple “scene“ in my living room and laid all the light modifiers I could find to use with a single light source to study how each individual piece of equipment I have at my disposal affect the results…and hone my skills of observation and analysis.
home quarantine assignment no.1 - one light, many light modifiers
Contact sheet I made from full scene photographs in Photoshop gives an overview of how each light modifier affected the scene. In order to understand their differences, I intentionally altered lights output only minimally and set the white balance once, at the beginning of the photo-session, using plain light bulb, with no attachments and left it as it was during the whole photo session.
I especially focused on two particular parts of the scene, face, its skin texture and shadows the light casts. Besides these, I looked at how focused and spilled light reflected off of surfaces and walls and how these therefore can serve as additional light modifiers to photographers advantage, or work against his intentions.
Generally, I believe, there is no right or wrong tool for the task, only tool used wrong or right, but that depends on ones knowledge of his tools. After all, even camera is just a tool. ;)
And the notes taken from this? Actually, quite a lot. And that was the point! First, it is different to have to cope with a given situation, right on the spot, under the pressure of paid assignment and having the privilege of time and ability to make mistakes or leave imperfections as they appear is quite liberating…and motivating.
