The word photography, etymologically speaking, is derived more or less from the combination of the Greek words photos, meaning light, and graphos, meaning painting or writing.  So photography is in essence concerned chiefly with using light and shadow as pen or as paintbrush.  It’s really at root a very evocative and romantic concept when you think about it. These days, I’m working mostly on portrait photography. And finding ways to use light (or to let light use me) to create good portraits is for now the most interesting, entertaining, and challenging part of pursuing this hobby. On the other hand, I’m certainly fickle enough to change my mind and begin to explore some other realm of photography before long.  That having been said, the question becomes this: how am I best to engage and manipulate the light?  Turns out that there are answers to this question just about everywhere.

There’s natural light. And boy is there plenty of it! The sun is big and it’s bright, and it’s dazzling.  Hard noonday sun gives lots and lots of light, and that’s a GOOD thing, isn’t it? Well, there’s a reason why natural light enthusiasts shoot outdoors at sunrise and at sunset, or wait until it’s somewhat overcast.  The sun is a very harsh light source, and if you’re shooting outside in direct sunlight, there are all kinds of harsh shadows with which to contend. I always thought that shooting with natural light was a bit limiting sometimes, for that very reason. You can do portraiture indoors with natural light, but for that, big windows come in handy, as do sheer white curtains — those help to diffuse the light and to avoid the aforementioned harshness of direct sunlight. Trouble is, I don’t have sheer curtains, and I have no intention of buying them.  Call me stubborn.  So it turns out that to use natural light to its best advantage, you have to wait.  Wait until it’s cloudy, wait until sunset. Wait until you can hang some sheer curtains, wait until your father gets home. Wait. What was I saying again?

If I’m not using natural light, I’m using un-natural light.  Maybe that’s not a correct way to phrase it — I’d be using a flash. One caveat, though, it would be an external flash, not the pop-up flash on my dSLR.  That pop-up flash is the AntiChrist artificial-light equivalent to direct sunlight. All the bad things I just talked about can be reproduced very easily with my camera’s onboard flash.  So I explored several alternatives.  First thing: buy an external flash of some kind or other.  Second thing: find a way to light my subject(s) without pointing the flash straight at them whenever possible.

I’ve used the walls and ceilings as diffusers.  It turns out that light bounces everywhere if you let it (who knew??).  You get some pretty even light without harsh shadows, and it’s light that goes just about everywhere and touches everything in the room.  I’ve also used the tried-and-tested method of attaching index cards to my flash with rubber bands.  That kind of thing works when the ceilings and walls are close. It works tremendously well when you’re shooting candids indoors.  But sometimes, it’s not really the kind of light that I want.

I bought myself a LightSphere once upon a time.  I don’t use it often any longer, but let me say that it is a very good light modifier for my purposes.  It provides nice, even light to most or all of the room. That’s both good and bad — sometimes I don’t want the entire room to be lit.  It’s very much like bouncing an unmodified flash in that regard, but in some indefinable way, the light looks better to my eye when I use the LightSphere.

And then you have the Demb Flip-It, which has turned out to be my favourite external flashgun modifier.  It does provide lighting characteristics that are similar to what you get with bouncing or with a LightSphere, but you get the added benefit of being able to control (to a certain extent) the amount of flash power that’s directed at your subject.  I haven’t experimented enough with this product yet, because I haven’t been in the right situation to use it to its fullest potential.  But then again, I haven’t taken my camera out enough lately!

Those are all portable ways to use light. I can grab my camera and I can drop a flash on, with or without a secondary modifier, and I can wander around a room, or I can chase people around.  I can even stick the flashgun on a stand or on a tripod, trigger it with a remote, and use it to light an entire room as I move around with my camera.  When I’m doing more formal portraits, I tend to use other solutions.

I bought a bunch of white foamcore and some cheap semiopaque cream-coloured fabric, and I built myself a couple of 20″ by 30″ softboxes.  Those softboxes work very, very well as light modifiers.  But they hang on the end of my flash in an irritating way, and by irritating, I mean that if I use them too often or if I leave them hanging on the unit, I run the risk of breaking the flash mount (or the cheap flash trigger to which it’s attached).

If I have the time and inclination, I sometimes break out the monolights.  I have a pair of 150-watt lights, complete with stands and umbrellas, and I set them up in my kitchen to shoot portraits.  If there’s such a thing as having too much light, this is how you achieve it, especially in a room the size of your average kitchen/dining room.  I must say, though, that using this light setup affords a level of control several steps beyond using a single external flashgun.  So far, this setup has been the most fun with which to experiment.

And now, I have a new project planned.  I’m a huge fan of not spending bucketloads of money on certain aspects of my photography.  I know that in certain ways, cheaper equipment is not the way to go.  But as it turns out, feeding my kids is almost always a higher priority than buying new equipment (again, who knew??).  So I build.  Once I can get my behind to the hardware store, I’ll (hopefully) turn the PVC pipe that’s sitting in my basement into a standup version of a softbox about 36″ by 72″ in size.  Maybe it’ll work out, and maybe it won’t, but either way it will be fun to try.

And you know what?  It’s all about keeping me amused.