The contrast assignment was the hardest of the course because it was the only “two dimensional assignment.” In order to get a successful or satisfying result your alignment of your scene had to fulfill TWO prerequisites.

First. You had to have the contrast, if your scene didn’t have the contrast you couldn’t physically enact any kind of shift in exposure, as everything would have shared the same fate.

Second, you couldn’t have just had ANY old light differential, it had to be aligned in a way that was structurally or compositionally useful. Examples of scenes that fit the first criterion but not the second: the horizon differential where everything that matters to the shot either informative aesthetically was on the ground, and therefore the sliver of sky in the shot was TECHNICALLY 5 stops brighter, but was totally irrelevant to what you were doing. The other example would be dappled light. As you shift exposure, you go from revealing random parts of the scene while concealing other random parts of the scene, and when you swap exposure it just gives you equally random reveal/conceal but in reverse. Both of those scenes fulfilled the quantifiable contrast requirement but not the second requirement.

One example of a scene that fulfills both is Ray Metzker. He made sure he aligned his shots so that his foreground was ENTIRELY in a different amount of light than his background. Didn’t even care which way it went, the person could be entirely in shadow while the city behind them was entirely in light, or the person could be entirely in light while the city behind them was entirely in shadow. Once he’s aligned that differential, it allows him to shift his exposure in such a way that he’s shifting the emphasis of the image from background to foreground, which is an awful lot like shifting focus, but using light instead. The more ASOP-y way to say it is that he got his light differential to piggyback atop his space differential, or that his space differential ENABLED his light differential.

You can see how we’re beginning to combine differentials. This what Photo2 will look like.

But one more example of a scene that satisfies both components would be portrait lighting such as facial contouring or rim light separation. Those are examples where there is measurable contrast, and it’s also aligned within the image, or exists in key strategic positions within the image in such a way that you can use shifts in exposure to alter the emphasis or archetype.

Both criteria were necessary here. That wasn’t true for either time or space.

In those exercises we often misaligned the shot so that we LOST our differential, but as long as we had the differential we could do the assignment.

Here that wasn’t enough, and that made this assignment trickier.

Finally, this is an observation, a diagnosis, but if there is a proactive skill to be teased out of this, it might look like this: example of the coffee shop exposure shift. If two parts of your scene are in the same light, they share the same fate. So before today, there may have been things in your foreground and things in your background, that in your mind had nothing to do with each other because they weren’t narratively related or they weren’t compositionally or aesthetically related, so your brain overlooked the fact that they were in the same amount of light, but now we know that they will share the same fate exposure wise, so whatever you do to emphasize one happens to the other and whatever you do to de-emphasize one will de-emphasize the other. Being more aware of that will allow you to align your shots with this in mind.

And if you even 1/6 understand any of that, you are leagues ahead of most photographers, who don’t tend to think like this at all. They aren’t particularly aware of this dynamic, what they tend to do is walk through a contrasty city and shoot 100 pictures, and then they go home and find that 8 of them “worked” and 92 of them “don’t work,” but they can’t put their finger on why and probably don’t care. They got their 8 images. But we need to know why, we need to know the culprit, because we need to be able to combine this technique with other maneuvers.

-Simplifications for understanding exposure theory.

1) it seems like there are a ton of different amounts of contrast and a ton of different ways to expose each of them (which seems abstract and implausibly complex), but in reality there are three TYPES of contrast and an average of 2 ways to expose each one. Once you encounter “low contrast 2 or 3 times, you’ll have it drilled into your head that there’s only one basic exposure that can be achieved. Once you encounter high contrast 2 or 3 times you’ll reinforce that it’s usually either/or, only 2 exposure options, etc. Then for the REST OF YOUR LIFE whenever you encounter those levels of contrast you’ll know what can and can’t be done with them. And that will never change. So not only is it not insurmountably complex, it’s actually the opposite, it’s sort of boring and predictable. But you have to train your brain to see these generic common threads, and not see every scene as a unique set of conditions. People tend to think exposure and contrast are the hardest part of photography at this early stage, because the language and terms are abstract. But once students are more advanced shooters they all tend to agree that exposure is the EASIEST part of photography, because it’s the most predictable and repetitive.

2) Second simplification is that this all seems abstract right now because each scene seems to have endless possibilities. I mean, I’m asking you to measure light, see how much contrast there is, and then consider what can be done with that, etc. It all sounds like a lot. But once you’re a fully fluent photographer you’ll work this in reverse. You’ll walk into a scene with an agenda, a certain image structure in mind, at which point you use the ,ether to confirm or disconfirm that you can carry out that image structure. Example of the bride in front of the window, they already know what they want to do with that image before they even pull out their camera, so the meter just tells them they can do it or can’t do it. Same with Ray Metzker when he measures that bus stop. So this all gets MUCH easier when you have an image structure in mind and you use your meter to confirm as opposed to using your meter as an exploratory device.

3) Don’t need to meter your subject, just something that is a tonal proxy for your subject. Something that shares the same fate as your subject. I use my hand, but you could use highlights and shadows on the ground etc. Air show example.

4) Don’t need to meter every shot. Only need to re-meter when your light fundamentally changes. People, think clouds change light, they don’t they just equalize your highlights with your shadows. Angle and composition don’t change this either. We spent the early part of the course disconnecting exposure from composition, here we’re also disconnecting it from subject matter. Exposure should ONLY be a reaction to the light, and nothing else. This liberates you entirely, and makes the entire process a million times easier as you don’t have to adjust your thinking from one shot to the next, worried about the variables of angle, composition, and subject matter that trip up your algorithms. Your algorithms are idiots.

-Light, Space, and Time.

Put on the board in order from most anchorable to least anchorable.

If you have to deal with all 3, this is the only order you can deal with them, anchor your light decisions, anchor your space decisions, and then deal with time as you’re taking the picture.

You might go 40 minutes with changing your exposure, you might go 5-10 minutes without changing your lens decisions, but time and movement is usually something dealt with on a minute by minute basis.

So from now on, go through this checklist in this order.

So I this room Light? Nah, not an asset.

Space? Yes it is.

Time? Nah.

So we have a “one asset” scene, so if I want to do ANYTHING to structure or author my images, on what piece of equipment will I be solely dependent upon?

The lens.

A well-trained photographer should walk into this room and immediately say “lens.” That’s what I’m working with.

The differentials lead the structural possibilities.

But most photographers don’t think this way, they tend to try to square peg a round hole because they think this has something to do with using the right camera settings, whereas it’s all about recognizing and aligning the differential.

But as an opposite example, consider the girl who went to the rodeo, she had light and time, but was too far away to use space. She should know the minute she sits down that she has two exposures and she can use time within each of them, and she should be very clear on that BEFORE she looks fro subject matter and starts framing her shots.

But what if we have no differentials. What if we went on a field trip to shoot Austin’s most famous murals and the day we went it was overcast. We’d literally be shooting a brick walk on an overcast day. No light, no space, no time.

That means all of us would have to take the same shot, or more aptly, of Ray Metzker and Sam Abell were standing in front of this scene, they’d have to take the same shot, they can’t execute the image to their forms of authorship because without any differentials they can’t differentiate their 8mages from each other.

So we might occasionally encounter a brick wall on an overcast day, but the problem is that a lot of students will turn a perfectly fruitful scene into a brick wall on an overcast day, because they’re thinking about subject and framing, but not physics. Parable of the band portrait. She had all three differentials and threw all 3 away because she was thinking parochially about how she could “get all 4 guys in the shot” and in doing so she took a scene that had 150 structural possibilities and reduced it to one, to the extent that if all 12 of us were standing there we’d have to take the same shot she did.

So back to this scene right here, I used to teach in a room with two differentials. Light and Space. That gave us 18 structural possibilities. Wedding photographer would choose one path, journalist would choose another, and the absurd artist would choose another. This scene ACCOMMODATED the disparate needs of a sentimental wedding photographer an informative journalist, and an absurd and dramatic artists, they all got to exercise their forms of authorship. Now go back to the brick wall overcast day, all three would have to take the same picture. So every once in a while you’ll encounter an ACTUAL BWOD and when you do you should be painfully aware of your lack of options. But what we can’t have is students TURNING a perfectly useful scene INTO a BWOD because they were thinking only about subject matter.

-Last insight is that multiple differentials don’t just allow for a diversity and uniqueness and specificity of authorship, they also allow more complexity. When you look at “pro” photographers you can se they’re using one differential at a time, that’s their portfolio, and you can’t unsee it now. Industry leaders and higher earners are using 2. And can you guess what world class, award winning photographers have in common? All three. That’s the difference. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Overarching insights from Photo1:

Differentials not settings

Alignment solves more problems than settings

Culprits

Structure:

4 pillars of photo structure,

if an image were a sentence, the subject would be the noun, and the image structure the descriptive phrase. The image needs to describe or narrate the subject, not merely present the subject.

Emphasis and archetype: reference the subject against another part of the scene(Hierarchy of information, emphasis), or reference the subject against an idea in people’s heads (archetype).

Image is like a sentence, the subject is the noun, and the image structure is the qualifier, the adjectives and verbs that describe or narrate that subject.

an image structure first evolves around a certain subject for fairly logical reasons. It then gains its associative meaning around that subject, to the point that you could subtract the subject from the photograph and the image would STILL carry that associative meaning.