Chile, análisis contextual del sistema de compras públicas

In Chapter 3, you learned that dramatic light is useful for any landscape photogra-phy. It can be especially important for black-and-white images, where you have only the tonalities of the scene to define it. Dramatic light gives you dramatic changes in the tonalities from bright areas to dark areas. It especially gives strong shadows that can offer strength to the tonalities of your photo.

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Shadows help define shapes into forms and make textures show up (Figure 8.11).

Side light is an important light for many black-and-white photos because it does such a good job of both. Start looking for shadows and what they’re doing in your black-and-white landscape, but also remember that although shadows can help, they also can hurt. Shadows in the wrong places across your scene can be distracting at any time, and this will be especially true with black-and-white imagery.

Now a caution: As soon as I say dramatic light is great, I know many people reading this will just start shooting dramatic light. But this isn’t a cure-all that always works.

It can be very effective for a black-and-white photo, but on the wrong subject, it can be terrible. Dramatic light coming from one direction may make a landscape look great, but from another direction at a different time of day, the light can look terrible because of shadows being in the wrong places, for example.

Also, dramatic light can be a challenge for exposure, especially if you have large areas of dark from shadows (this can be a large shadow or lots of shadow in texture).

Your camera will see those dark areas and often overcompensate and cause impor-tant sunlit areas of the scene to be overexposed. Dramatic light can lose its effect when this happens. You may have to underexpose such scenes in order to hold the drama. However, this doesn’t mean automatically shooting with a lot of underexpo-sure, either—that can make for very murky, muddy-looking black-and-white photos.

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Backlight is something to make friends with if you want to succeed with black-and-white landscape photography. This does not mean that backlight is the only light to use for this type of work. It does mean that it offers so many benefits for black-and-white images that it has long been used for effective black-black-and-white landscape photography.

Many of the aspects of dramatic light also apply to backlight. When the sun is bright, backlight can be very dramatic (Figure 8.12). It creates bold shadows, sparkle on water, and strong texture. But backlight also helps when the light is more subtle as well. Subtle light can be challenging to use for black-and-white photography. By looking for backlight in those conditions, you often can gain some needed contrast.

Again, be very careful of your backgrounds with backlight. Avoid big, blank areas of sky. Avoid any large overexposed area. And watch out for glare and flare.

Sometimes no matter what you do, you can’t avoid flare. And sometimes you can use that flare to good effect. Try moving around slightly to see if you can get the flare to fall in parts of the image that aren’t hurt by it and where it might even add a cool look!

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A strong and obvi-ous backlight adds drama to this image of towering redwoods in California’s Humboldt State Park.

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silhouEttEs

Silhouettes are especially effective in black-and-white photography. A silhouette defines the composition by putting a dark foreground object against a bright background.

There are two things you really have to be careful of with a silhouette: the foreground object and exposure. You can’t simply silhouette your object—pay attention to what it looks like and what angle will make that silhouette look its best.

Exposure is always an issue with silhouettes. You need to be careful not to give too much or too little exposure. Too much exposure will make the subject and background too bright, and you’ll lose the silhouette effect. Too little exposure, and the background gets dark instead of light, and you’ll also lose the effect. Your camera reacts to the brightness of the scene. If you have a lot of shadow, the camera will tend to give too much exposure, so you need to force it to give less (you can use minus exposure compensation with autoexposure).

If you have a large bright area behind the subject, the camera will tend to expose to make the bright area dark instead of bright. In that case, you need to force it to give more exposure (you can use plus exposure compensation with autoexposure).

Also, you really need a lot of contrast between your subject and the background for a silhouette to work well (Figure 8.13). Just underexposing a subject in front of a background won’t give you a silhouette. The image should start with high contrast between the subject and the background.

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looking at coloR foR Black-and-WhitE