Digital Camera Light

To highlight the importance of light, we only need to remember that we don't perceive reality , but more properly, the light emitted or reflected by it. It's probable that our sight is mainly centered on the perception of objects and beings that constitute our surroundings; vision adapts to almost any situation, which is why light is something that is taken for granted and at first isn't an object of conscious observation in our daily life.

On the other hand, in the moments we can dedicate to observation, we realize that light has infinite forms of presenting itself and is indissolubly connected to the way we see things. Besides making perception possible, light itself has many ties for us, many meanings and gives us a large amount of environmental information. Our sight is automatically adapted to the characteristics of available light, although these vary greatly because of it's nature, its color and intensity. Having your eyes opened and seeing is much more instinctive for us than making a photograph of what we're seeing. For example, we can see the expression of a person to the light of a lit cigarette in the darkness, but we can't photograph it because film of that sensitivity is not sold in stores; we can see “normal” colors with any kind of white light, but the same doesn't happen in color photography; we see all the zones with simultaneous detail even in contrasted light conditions, but in photography the registration capacity is much lower. The operation of film marks a limit between what we can see and what we can photograph. Besides these limitation, in chapter 3 we have seen that the camera can't work by itself and assure technically better results. An exposure that is not adequate to the brightness and contrast characteristics of the scene can cause the destruction of a large part of the image.

Even though we know it's operation well, we can't operate the camera and film without a more conscious look of what we are going to photograph. Photography is only the registration of light, and the richness of the reconstruction of the original light which is directly linked to the technical quality of the images. To achieve better exactitude in the use of film or the digital camera, the only thing missing is to define more precisely the characteristics of the light with which we want to photograph; is we are able to attentively observe and define them with terms that allow us to relate them with the limits that photography imposes on us, be it with film or digital, we can be sure that the decisions we adopt before shooting will be the correct ones.

When examining or comparing the different types of light with each other we can use some concepts that allow us to work out it's way of manifesting itself; these concepts are the main characteristics of any light: the intensity, quality and direction define the way the different brightness are presented, and are relevant to any type of film; the knowledge of the color of the light is indispensable for a control of the tones and there eventual modification through filters.