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What Is the Light Doing?
WE HAVE ONLY A FEW RAW MATERIALS in photography: light, space, and time. What we do with these using the box in our hands determines what our photograph will look like. Being able to see them and understand them, especially knowing how the camera sees them, is the lifelong pursuit of the photographer. For my purposes as a teacher, I have often reduced my approach to a scene to three questions that serve as reminders of these raw materials: What is the light doing, what are the lines doing, and when is the moment? This book further unpacks these questions, not only by asking, for example, about the light itself, but what choices we can make with that light.
When we first learn to use a camera, we most often approach ...
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