A key skill for photography

To really start to elevate our photography we first need to unlock the secrets of light.

Light is, without doubt, the most important element of photography, far higher up the pecking order than any piece of camera equipment that we could buy. It has more impact on our final image than our lenses or sensors, no matter how much money has been spent on them! If our sensor (or film) is nothing more than a blank canvas, then light is the brush waiting to paint that canvas with mood, colour, atmosphere, depth, dimension, and visual magic. No light, no magic

As photographers we are light chaser. And once we begin to think of photography as the harnessing of light, we’ll take our passion for getting out and taking photographs to a whole new level of awe-inspiring visual stories.

That’s why the truely great photographers stand apart. They observe light constantly, making it a lifetime goal, and they make critical compositional decisions based on those observations. It’s through a longer term approach to the observation of light, taking note of the nuances, the different qualities light has, that we can take leaps forward in our photography.

In the below video, we’ll take journey through several locations discussing light as we go. It isn’t just observing the quality of light that matters but keening our eye to understand the direction of light too.