Hello Lynnie!
Thanks for submitting another assignment!!
It’s always exciting to see how the students are doing.
I’ve been a little bogged down with the assignments recently so sorry for the delay. Sometimes people submit lots of assignments in a short period of time and I can’t get to them all as soon as I’d like.
The assignment:
In this lesson you will take two photographs. Your first photograph must be taken in a soft lighting situation, achieved artificially or naturally and the second photograph should be a fairly exaggerated hard lighting photograph. Again, you can achieve this hard lighting situation naturally or artificially.
You have submitted two photographs.
Your first photograph (of Sylar cuuuuute!!) is your soft lighting photograph. This photograph is quite nice in its own right and in terms of lighting you’ve done a decent job of achieving ‘soft lighting’. In this case it appears to be an overcast day. The benefit of knowing the difference between soft and hard light is that you can then take advantage of these lighting situations to create the feel/mood/effect/look that you want. Or you can create these looks by adding or removing light from a situation.
Your hard lighting photograph is also a nice photograph. I was recently in paris and noticed a similar effect in the sky where many planes we’re intersecting and leaving contrails. In terms of ‘lighting’ it’s hard to critique this one because when you shoot the sky you’re shooting light as it goes through the atmosphere. This appears to be taken around sunset and as such the light is actually softer than you’d think. Hard natural light occurs mostly during the middle of the day. You can look at the shadows and if they’re straight down you’re usually in a hard light situation. As I mentioned before, this only matters if you take advantage of your light to get the look and feel you want. If you just want to take better photos then simply being aware of the light your shooting in works wonders. For example it’s often hard to shoot portraits in mid day hard light. So if someone asks you to photograph them you might want the schedule it for a time of day when the light is better.
Thanks again Lynnie!