This exercise looks at the advantages of using low sun. The "golden" hour just after sunrise and before sunset is well known as the best time of day for landscape photography in particular.
I performed a search on the Internet to see if there is a succinct reasoning behind the attraction of early or late light. Wikipedia put it thus:
Typically, lighting is softer (more diffuse) and warmer in hue, and shadows are longer. When the sun is near the horizon, sunlight travels through more of the atmosphere, reducing the intensity of the direct light, so that more of the illumination comes from indirect light from the sky (Thomas 1973, 9–13), reducing the lighting ratio. More blue light is scattered, so that light from the sun appears more reddish. In addition, the sun's small angle with the horizon produces longer shadows.
To be even more succinct, I think there are three main advantages of low sun shooting:
- Warmth of the sun's rays which are more golden;
- The sky is clearer and more blue;
- Less atmospheric noise - haze and the like
I used a wood sculpture on Cock Road Ridge in Kingswood as a subject. Not only is this handily placed near the top of the ridge, it also has inbuilt intricacy to capture the impact of the low light and shadows. The shots were all taken between1745 and 1800 on 2 October, the last day of 2011's Indian summer.
All the shots were taken using aperture of f13, the first two at 1/60 shutter speed, the back lit image at 1/125, and the edge lit image at 1/45. ISO 200 used throughout.
The first image is frontal lighting:
This is the classic shot with sun behind the photographer. The notes suggest the lighting should be intense; perhaps this was a little too late for this to be the case here, but the colour is certainly intense - compare the colour of the sculpture with the back lighting shot below. The lighter parts reflect the sun well and there is a plenty of depth created by the sculpting effect and differential weathering.
Secondly is side lighting:
This image works very well. The detail is highlighted well, and there is a greater sense of the depth of the sculpting compared with the frontal view. The warning in the notes about overexposure was heeded by lowering the exposure value by two stops.
The back lighting image was post processed using Photomatix HDR software:
The notes suggested bracketing this shot; sound advice that meant the resultant three images could be HDR processed enabling a reasonable degree of detail to be seen in the sculpture despite the contra jour positioning. Photomatix is an unpredictable tool but worked admirably for this image. In practice, this is not a subject one would take contra jour for precisely the reason that the scultpture detail is more apparent taken frontally or from the side, but the shot makes for an interesting comparison. The eye is drawn to the bright grass either side of the sculpture more then to the sculpture itself, and has difficulty resolving where to rest, flicking between the left and right hand sides. The sky is more interesting. The graffiti actually adds something to the image, helping to draw the eye centrally - there is a sort of triangle created by the bright grass areas and the graffiti, going back to ground covered in Part 2.
Lastly there is edge lighting:
The edge lighting shot was more difficult to compose. The sun is out of shot and the edge of the sculpture is lit. The rest of the sculpture is underexposed - I tried exposure bracketing but did not work well with this image, getting lens reflection is higher exposed images. In any case, the edge lighting effect is enhanced by a dark foreground. The actual area of edge lighting is small in the frame, so minimal extra information is required so as to appreciate the light effect.
This exercise helped me to understand further the advantages of low light shooting, and opened up possibilities for using different angles, not simply the frontal shot.
