Shooting Project #3: Light & Landscape

PHD101

Introduction to Photography & Design

Shooting Project#3: Light & Landscape

Due Week 4, after Lab period

Light is your primary tool as a photographer to establish a mood. Focusing on quality of light, shoot at least 50 photographs in which you are observing the way in which light enhances and interacts with a landscape or variety of landscapes of your choice. 

Consider our discussion of the genre of landscape in class, and how landscapes can go deeper than beauty shots of nature.  Seek to use light to evoke a mood or communicate a concept about the landscapes (wild, industrial, man-altered, or abstract) that you’re photographing.

Make an effort to capture a variety of different landscapes and lighting scenarios.  Pay attention to the following factors that affect quality of light:

Directionality:  Where the light is coming from and how resulting shadows fall.  This will change depending upon the time of day and position of the subject in relation to the light.  Directions of light may include:  backlighting, side-lighting, high side-lighting, low side-lighting, front lighting.

Specularity:  Is the light coming from a single, direct source (specular), causing harsh shadows? Or is it diffused by a window, clouds or other material so that it appears soft, coming from multiple directions at once?  Observe particularly how specularity affects contrast, or the difference between highlights and shadows, in the image.

Color:  Light at twilight appears more cool and blue in tone.  Late afternoon sunlight can look golden.  Midday may look white and bright.  Not only does the color cast of light vary depending on the time of day, but by the type of source.  You may look at artificial light and the color cast it creates, while still doing your best to use effective white balance.

Weather Conditions:  Keep your camera with you at all times, so that you’re not stuck with one cloudy Portland scene.  Light peaks through the clouds.  Fall mornings can be foggy.  Sun emerges just after the rain.  All of these conditions yield unique qualities of light.

Submission standards

You’ll have the first 30 minutes of class to go through the Lightroom import/export workflow.  Choose your 5 strongest images that convey a variety of approaches to light & landscape.  Process & organize them through LR, and remember the following parameters:

·       Add contact info, copyright, and keywords to the IPTC metadata of all images

·       Resize to 150 ppi, 10” for the longest dimension

·       Rename as LastName_ProjectName_sequence#

·       File Format = jpeg

·       Color Space = Adobe RGB

·       Output Sharpening = Screen

Grading

All shooting projects are worth 30 points and are graded according to the following criteria:

·       Image management (following assignment specifications outlined during lab period)

·       Creativity of approach to concept (effort and thought demonstrated)

·       Visual impact (use of photographic seeing, basic mastery of technique)