Food for digital Thought: Is Light Everything?

by Joe on April 24, 2022

I chase light

You bet it is…sometimes!!!

I recently had a conversation with a fellow photographer that follows my blog about the statement I always make to my online classes with the BPSOP and to my “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops that “light is everything”. However, according to Mark light is not everything, emotion is and then quoted Henri Cartier-Bresson. It seems that Bresson was quoted as saying that light was “just the perfume to the image”.

Ok, let’s all jump into my time machine and travel back to the year 1971, when I was a young and restless photo-journalistic, street shooting for Associated Press, United Press International, and Blackstar, besides every Sunday supplement I could convince to hire me for their feature assignments. I would absolutely agree that capturing the emotion of the moment was more important than light. To be sure, being chased down the streets during the race riots of the early seventies was not a good time to stop and ask the guys chasing me (while I was re-loading my Nikon F motor drive) if they could move over into the sunlight; or come back during the “Golden hour”.

I couldn’t have cared less if it was bright and sunny or overcast and gloomy, I cared about getting the shot, at the peak of action if I could. BTW, it wasn’t about money then since UPI paid me $60.00 a photo…if it was transmitted over the wire. If the light was nice, then yes, it was the “perfume”.

That said, that is a particular genre and while it’s still a huge factor, it’s the perfume that I’m now after. First of all, I’m way too old and gray to be chased down the street anymore. These days I’m more interested in finding ways to incorporate the elements of Visual Design and using the light to enhance them. Its Shape, Pattern, Texture, Balance, Form, Line, and of course Color. that’s on my mind.

If there’s going to be any chasing, then it will be me ‘chasing after the light’!!!

Visit my website at www.joebaraban.com and check out my workshop schedule at the top of this blog. Come shoot the light with me sometime.