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’ve done very well with the assignment and it looks like you’ve proven to yourself and to me that you understand the difference between soft light and hard light.
Your first image is quite nice from a light perspective but there are a couple minor things that could have been better.
1. Composition
2. Focus
1: The composition is a bit tight and there is very little ‘head room’ in this shot to accomodate the top two pieces of leaves/grass/gree. Also there is an element in the lower right that adds no value to the frame as it’s not clear what it is.
2. My guess is that it was a little breezy when you shot this and this plant was moving around. Given that your shutter speed would have needed to be slightly higher to keep good focus.
Your hard light image is quite nice but as you’ll notice there is a very common problem: blown out whites. There is a loss of detail on the gate because it’s blown out.
In such harsh and powerful direct sunlight you will often struggle to keep your frame from having spots of blown out white. You can also stop down or use an ND filter to overcome this. Otherwise this is a nice image!
The main thing is to always be thinking about what kind of light you’re shooting in. Is it hard or soft? Then, you can make changes accordingly.
Good work!