The Visual Toolbox: 60 Lessons for Stronger Photographs

Lesson 30. Quality of Light: Further Considerations

If you read the previous lessons’ imagined scenario all the way through without stopping to do your homework, you’d have made three photographs in a couple of minutes, much less time than it took for me to write it or for you to read it. The sun wouldn’t have changed enough to notice it. The tree was the same tree. The field, too, remained the same. And yet in those brief moments you’d have created three very different photographs. You’d likely have composed those photographs differently, as each new scenario gave you new possibilities and drew your eye in new directions, placing the side-lit tree to the left of the frame, for example, to give room for the pull of that great shadow.

Nikon ...