This is a follow up post to an earlier entry titled A Photographers Raw Material .
A photographer’s raw material is light. You can’t touch it with your hands. You can’t smell it with your nose. You can’t taste it with your tongue, You can’t hear it with your ears.
You can see light with your eyes and you can feel light on an emotional and psychological level.
When you see light you can observe six characteristics.
- Color
- Distribution
- Direction
- Intensity
- Movement
- Texture
When you feel light you can be impacted in various ways. Advertisers and marketers try to sway you by using color psychology while those of us who have Seasonal Affective Disorder use light therapy to help alleviate the condition.
As a photographer you’ve decided to communicate by using a camera to record light.
As a photographer you need to become keenly aware of light, your raw material, on a visual and emotional/psychological level.
While you need to understand how to work your camera, your camera is incidental to your work as a photographer. I think that our work as photographers is about observing and recording light as a means of communication.