Ex 4.2 Artificial Light

Exercise 4.2: Artificial Light

Brief

“Capture ‘the beauty of artificial light’ in a short sequence of shots (‘beauty’ is, of course, a subjective term). The correct white balance setting will be important; this can get tricky – but interesting – if there are mixed light sources of different colour temperatures in the same shot. You can shoot indoors or outside and the light can be ambient or handheld flash.

Add the sequence to your learning log. In your notes try to describe the difference in the quality of light from the daylight shots in Exercise 4.1.”

I approached this exercise by taking an evening walk close to my house to make some images of scenes familiar to me, but illuminated by the street lights. In this way I was trying to see how the resulting images differed from those I might have expected when made in the daylight.

My objective here was not to create “definitive” final images, but to gain a better understanding of the technical aspects of photographing in these conditions and to examine those elements of the final images which might be used to produce a series which do indeed capture the “beauty of artificial light”.

As I wanted to explore a range of locations, and used lightweight equipment for this reason. I used a Canon Powershot G7x Mkii for these images rather than my DSLR. It still enables me to use manual, as well as aperture and speed priority shooting modes and for this exercise I used manual mode. I made the images between 2100h and 2300h GMT when sunset was at 2029h.

I used manual shooting mode with a setting of “auto white balance” for all the images. Post-processing of the images is confined to modest cropping to a 4×5 aspect ratio (chosen because I have been using 10×8 printing paper for my film work and wanted a degree of consistency with this). There are also local exposure adjustments but no alteration in the white balance or other colour adjustments.

The contact sheets for this shoot are at

Ex 4-2 Contacts #1

Initially I used the camera hand-held with a fast ISO. This image shows considerable grain so at subsequent locations I used much longer exposures on a tripod.

In most of the images the sky is not totally black and in this it almost looks like daylight. However, the major difference in this image is the direction of the lighting, rather than any other quality of the light.

Where there are many light sources, this effect is more striking and the differences in the colour of the lights adds a difference in the mood and atmosphere of the scene.

The long exposures used enabled the incorporation of the moving lights of vehicles, even though the vehicle itself does not appear in the image. This adds a different quality to the image, and an effect I think I might develop more in the future. I do not think that in these images this effect adds much.

The camera makes it very obvious that different types of street light have very different colour qualities, and this golden effect is reminiscent of that in the images of Rut Blees Luxemburg. The reflections of the lights from parked vehicles and pools of light and dark give these images a mystery and I think show a type of beauty of which we are not normally aware.