Sunday 23 August 2015

Camera Challenge 7: Using natural light outdoors


The challenge this month was to photograph an object just after dawn, at the natural midday, and just before dusk, on both sunny and cloudy days. I took hundreds of photos, so I warn you this will take a while!

This is my first attempt:

Unfortunately I left the light balance setting on "Cloudy" instead of "automatic", but it is consistently cloudy! In fact it wasn't really cloudy at all!

Then I waited for a really cloudy day, and waited, and waited, and had a couple of thunder storms, but no opportunity to go outside and take photos of chess pieces while the sky was overcast.

When, earlier this week,  I read Katy's review post I got a shock: she had sky in all her photos. I'd got it completely wrong! I had four days to do it again.

Which of course I did, but may have focussed too much on the sky.


Looking east:

Not all the photos in this series were taken on the same day, so I've added a note on the date, and the weather conditions. They were all taken at ISO 400 setting, and manual exposure.
Saturday 22/08 brilliantly sunny day!
Friday 21/08 cloudy in the afternoon
Thursday 20/08 sunny day

If you live in a flat land there is inevitably an awful lot of sky! (It's no wonder Rembrandt was an expert at painting light!) If you live on the ninth floor you have more than most. I love the colour of the sky in the 21:23h  photo, so here it is again!


and, in spite of the light pollution on the right, white surfaces are also showing blue.

Of course I can look in more than one direction:

Looking south-west.


Yellow glow shortly after dawn (well, an hour after; I should have got up earlier!)

bleached at noon

just after sunset: blue glow?

just after sunset: blue glow?
Again these weren't all taken on the same day.

What have I learnt?
Just after sunrise objects are tinted yellow/orange and just after sunset they're tinted blue.
Just before sunset objects have an orange glow (White Queen)
The midday sun bleaches objects.

What I didn't learn from doing is what happens just before sunrise because I reacted too late (the sun woke me up!). But these I learnt from early-bird Katy in her review.

Thanks Katy: it was a puzzle but I think I've got it now!

I'm linking up to 
Littlest Thistle Camera Challenge 2015 
so hop over there and see what others have achieved
and marvel at Katy's wonderful photos.

Happy snapping!

Marly.

2 comments:

Katy Cameron said...

Well done! I understand what you mean about the sky now, I thought you meant you'd only done the sky before, whereas your first photos were perfect, as they showed how the light behaved throughout the day :o) The sky is lovely too, it's just that as a predominantly landscape photographer, that's what my photos tend to have in them!

I think you've learned the lesson excellently, and hopefully it will stand you in good stead for the next exercise.

Ruth said...

I think the one thing that surprises people too is in broad daylight how blue the light can be in the shade. I love that summer glow you get with late evening light too!