the study of light

Despite my own technical difficulties in portrait class today, I enjoyed taking the time to look at how painters and photographers work with different light sources and lights of varying strengths and directions, including Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Steve McCurry, Gregory Crewdson and more. We worked with a flashlight to help us learn to "see" and then experimented with flash, as both "key" light and "fill" light, dialing up and down to get different ratios between ambient and added light. Of course, I couldn't get my flash to work properly and spent a good portion of the class trying to work it out but finally at the end of the day, got it more or less sorted out. Perhaps not the greatest portrait here but at least it's lit with a fill flash, one of my first times accomplishing this feat.