The Visual Toolbox: 60 Lessons for Stronger Photographs

Lesson 32. Light: Reflections

The next four lessons are less about how we accomplish one particular effect or the other; they are better considered as exercises in awareness. Because we see the world three dimensionally (until the camera flattens a scene), and because we take these effects for granted, we sometimes neglect to truly see them. In so doing, we miss an opportunity to incorporate them into our compositions, realizing too late that, for example, we were looking at the subject so intently that we didn’t notice his shadow, and so we cut it off prematurely so that the lines in the image now don’t resolve as powerfully as they could have if they hadn’t been cut off by the frame.

Nikon D800, 26mm, 1/1000 @ f/10, ISO 200Lemaire Channel, ...