Brief – Revisit one of the exercise on daylight, artificial light or controlled light and develop it into a formal assignment submission; a set of between six and ten high-quality photographic prints.
Practitioners Researched
To begin with I looked at Japanese photographer Sato Shintaro. His series ‘Night Lights’ demonstrates that night photography doesn’t have to be dark. He uses the ‘blue hour’, the period of time between dusk and night, to depict a Tokyo made of light. Another photographer I looked into was Rut Blees Luxemburg. Her series Liebeslied (My suicide) reveals a kind of alchemy at work, a secret process that uses artificial light to turn the streets into gold. I was massively inspired by this set of images. It also inspired Ivan Radman to create his own series of alchemical night time shots. When looking through these series of images I was really drawn to how they’d experimented with the use of artificial light.
Even Picasso was fascinated by artificial light:
“The light I have at night is magnificent. I even prefer it to natural light. You should come one night to see it. A light that sets off every object, dark shadows making a ring around the canvases and projected onto the beams; you find them in most of my still lives, almost all of them painted at night. Whatever the atmosphere, it becomes our own substance, it rubs off on us, arranges itself to fit our nature”.
Photographer Nick Turpin also experimented with artificial light through a series called ‘Autos’. Nick “Wanted to find a way of exploring the omnipresence of advertising in the public realm.” He did this by exploiting the powerful coloured glare of Piccadilly Circus’s billboards. He captures reflections of the advertisement o the shiny surfaces of cars in the area; the way the light plays on these surfaces to create an intense graphic look is fascinating.
An inspiring photographer Todd Hido is renowned for creating eerie, mysterious and sometimes moving photographs through the use of artificial light; “I just follow the light, literally. And I often will just point my camera to where the light is and where that glow occurs”. A lot of his images feature a lone source of light that illuminates its surroundings. This is also really inspiring for me, the idea of one single light source that illuminates the rest of the image is very effective. It shows that one images that originally seems so dark, can actually be bright through artificial light.
My Images
For my perspective on artificial light I decided to take a night time walk; focusing on the street lights as my source of light. I took multiple photographs, and the first two I took came out blurry as the camera wasn’t properly focused. But this gave me the inspiration for the rest of my images, the blur of the lampposts created a glare that made the images more unique. I decided to then take a more dynamic approach and purposefully create a collection of ‘blurry’ images, or to put it more professionally; a collection of images showing motion within my street.
This first images almost mimics the stars, another form of artificial light.
I found this way of experimenting with light really interesting, as I hadn’t took photographs like this before. Although the setting was quite plain and there wasn’t much ‘nightlife’, the blur of the street lights really made the image.
I kept my camera on the Automatic white balance setting as this seems to work well in most situations, the colours from the streetlights seemed to come out quite cool toned and natural which I liked.
As well as this, as there was a severe lack of nightlife I focused on the negative space, seeing the empty street brings a sense of depth to the images.
This image was more of a landscape shot, capturing the whole street in motion. This particular view was one I really wanted to photograph, the view of all the street lights made a good landscape shot. One reoccurring thing throughout this collection of images is the lack of nightlife, you see parked cars and lots of houses but no cars driving about, or people walking in the street. I was able to capture the lack of nightlife in my area at this time (9pm) and how the streetlights bring the effect of nightlife. Without this source of artificial light the street would be very dull.
When I went on my walk I was with my younger sister, who happened to be walking of my when I took one of my pictures, which I think added to it well. The image above was taken with a very slow shutter speed, at 1/20 which was how the motion was created. A lot of the motion came from my hands and I was holding my camera and none of them were taken by tripod.
I tried a different perspective with this shot, shooting from beneath the streetlight to really capture the glare that was created.
Despite there being no street light in the image above, I used the flash as my source of artificial light and still kept within the theme of the blurry images. I also shot with a low ISO so this added to the darkness of the image.
My final image was of a Tesco Express across the road, with a streetlight to slightly light up the car park. I found this form of artificial light quite interesting to experiment with, although there wasn’t really any ‘nightlife’, I think this gave me the opportunity to focus on more simple things like negative space and perspectives. I think I stuck to the brief well and developed my original idea by taking my photography outside and seeing what inspired me.
OCA Photography Expressing your Vision 