The Importance of Light Quality in Landscape Photography

I’ve just returned from a two weeks road trip and, as usual, after such trips there is much to do before I can get around to reviewing the photos taken during such trips.  Added onto the usual catching up with items around the house, I’ve had to work to correct some software issues, at least some of which I created myself due to the way I decided to use a portable hard drive for Lightroom photos and the Lightroom catalog, so that I can work from both laptop and desktop computers.

In addition, I decided to upgrade my old Nik software, which has not been supported for some time now, to the new DXO Nik version.  The software installed and ran on my MacBook Pro, but it did not want to run properly on my iMac.  It took quite a bit of work over a couple of days to sort this out.  In the end, I’m not sure what action(s) actually cured the problem, but at least now it is operational.  In the process I learned how to remove the links to the old Nik versions from Lightroom.  One would think this would be an easy, straight forward task, but no search of Adobe’s Help yielded any results on this topic, nor was DXO support completely helpful.  Finally, I got suggestions from the Adobe community forum, none of which related directly to my installation, but at least got me onto the right track, allowing me to find and remove the problem files.

So now back to the subject of this post.  Experienced landscape photographers need not read any more of this post, since I’m not revealing anything new here.  However, beginners or novice landscape photographers might benefit from information shared here.

Light is the essence of photography.  It is light that allows one to make photographs and the properties of light affect the resulting photographs.  Readers may have heard the term “Golden Hour Light”, used by landscape photographers. This term refers to natural light just as the sun is rising or setting.  At these times, when the sun is low in the sky, sunlight has to travel through more of the earth’s atmosphere, which favors the transmission of the warmer colors, filtering out the cooler colors.  It is the “warmer light” that really bring to life objects illuminated by such light.

In this post I am showing an example of a scene shot with only the beginnings of this light and one with much more of this golden hour light.

The photo above, while lacking in great depth of field, shows the effect of muted late day light.  It was a cloudy day and only a little golden hour light is getting through the cloud cover.  This photo is taken looking north with the sunlight coming from the west.  This is referred to as sidelight and is good for casting shadows, adding depth to a 2 dimensional photo.  Note that there is only a sliver of brighter light going diagonally from the lower left corner towards the upper right and there are minimal shadows, but at least the light alternates in a repeating cycle from dark to light across the photograph.  The overall tone is dark.  Compare this to the photo below, taken just moments later.

The cloud cover is still muting the light in the second photo, but it is obviously much brighter and warmer with stronger shadows.  The original image files for each of these final images are raw camera files with adjustments in Adobe Lightroom and Nik software.  I’ve applied essentially the same edits to both photos.  The difference the light properties make in these images is obvious.  The second image “pops” much more than the first image.

As a side note, there is a photo shoot within these photos, which I did not fully realize, until enlarging these images during the processing.  In the first photo, near the upper center in the sand just below the sky there are three figures, one female on the left in a red dress and two males to her right.  At the time I took the photo, I just noted that there were three people walking in the background.  While processing the second photo, I noted these same three people now grouped together just below the skyline on the left side of the photo.  The enlargement shows a lighting umbrella device on a tripod, hence the conclusion that this is a photo shoot of the female in the red dress.  These figures are only clearly visible (but not in sharp focus), if one enlarges the photo.

That is all for this post.  I will have much more to share from this trip in subsequent posts.

Until then,

Ken