Beecher's Handouts /

Lighting Contrast / 6.1 - Introduction

As we learned in the previous section, film and digital sensors "see" the world differently than we do.

Photography paper does as well.

We see this with our eyes:

While our photographs are like this:

What we see is NOT what we get.

This is more pronounced when you're using light coming from the side—sidelighting—or from behind your subject—backlighting.

That's because the shadows created by sidelighting and backlighting will appear much darker with film or a digital sensor—than they appear to your eyes.

Photography "vision" has more contrast than does human vision.

This has been a problem since the beginning of photography.

Eadweard Muybridge, famous for his studies of movement, was also an accomplished landscape photographer.

When photographing Yosemite, he could not record the sky and the landscape on the same wet plate

Muybridge solved the problem using two different methods:

1) 1) He combined a negative of clouds with a negative of a landscape, when making a print.

Today, we use software to combine two files, one file exposed for the clouds, and the other one exposed for the landscape.

2) 2) Muybridge also used a board flap inside his camera to block the brighter light from the sky during a portion of an exposure. He called the feature a sky shade.

This is similar to how we use a graduated neutral density filter today.

Again, the increase in contrast can be both detrimental and beneficial to your photography.

How?