Duncan Davidson's Journal
An ongoing collection of thoughts, images, and links from an avid photographer, recurrent author, and recovering software developer.
An ongoing collection of thoughts, images, and links from an avid photographer, recurrent author, and recovering software developer.
One of the terms that photographers throw around a lot when talking about light is quality. At the same time, they’ll talk about good light and bad light. It’s important to note that these two thoughts are entirely separate. When I look at a scene say the light is good, I’m referring to its suitability for my particular purpose. When I say it’s bad, I mean that it sucks for what I want to use it for. But, either way, I’m not referring to its quality in the same way that one would compare shirts at a department store.
Instead, in photography, we use the term quality to describe the kinds of shadows that it produces when directed at a subject. We typically talk about the quality of light using terms like hard and soft.
Hard light produces strongly defined shadows with very distinct shadows. Sunlight on a clear day is hard light. Think of the kinds of lines you get when you use a very hard pencil. The transitions between light and shadow are very crisp and distinct. Soft light, on the other hand, produces shadows where the transition from fully illuminated to full shadow is gradual. The softest of all light, like that you’ll see on an overcast day, may produce no discernible shadow at all.
Between hard and soft, there’s a range of words and phrases you’ll hear photographers use. Clean light, harsh light, light that wraps, and even light that has pop. There’s no real magic definition of what these words mean. At best, we’re just reaching for adjectives that can convey a fuzzy approximation of what we see. Whenever we hear a good phrase from another photographer, we’ll rapidly incorporate it into our own lexicon.
One thing is for sure. Hard light is neither good nor bad, neither is soft light. It all depends on what use you want to put light to.
Over on the TEDBlog, Emily McManus interviews Laurie Garrett about the current flu, how things have changed since 2007, and how the WHO is reacting. She also provides the interesting observation that H1N1 seems to be a human virus that went through pigs, then birds, back to pings, and now back to us thanks. Furthermore, the food industry isn’t helping this with its current practices.
Tim Bray weighs in with his take on the ongoing nastiness in the Rails community with two observations and three recommendations, including the following: When you offend people but didn’t mean to, you should just fucking well apologize. Amen.
The front page of the RailsConf 2009 website features a set of photos that I’ve taken at previous iterations of the conference. This year’s iteration of the conference is coming up next week in Las Vegas.
The entire Ruby on Rails community has spent the last week embroiled in a discussion about Matt Aimonetti’s CouchDB: Perform Like a pr0n Star presentation at last week’s Golden Gate Ruby Conference. The presentation itself was just the spark to the firestorm. Martin Fowler’s SmutOnRails post pulls together the full story.
I wonder how much of the blowback from this will still be echoing around next week’s RailsConf in Las Vegas. My guess: a lot.
I’d heard a little while ago that Tim was writing a book with Sarah Milstein about Twitter and they were using—gasp—PowerPoint to do it. I was a bit skeptical about it at first, but hearing Tim fill in the details, I totally get what they’re doing. Actually, I applaud it. We need to try more new experiments with the way we push information and see where this train is going.
Tho, I think if I were going to try using a presentation tool as an environment, I’d use Keynote.
Julie Wheeler’s post isn’t about ice cream, but about body image. Body image problems are a bitch. I’ve got ‘em. I know lots of people that have them. The number one thing that I consistently have to work through with subjects in my photography is the whole body issue thing. It shouldn’t be that way. We should all be able to own ourselves.
The best camera is the one that’s with you. Chase Jarvis uses his iPhone every day and shares out images online via his Twitter account and FaceBook page. He’s collected a portfolio of 32 images taken with his iPhone as one of the portfolios on his website. (via Chase’s blog)
In a bit of whimsey that I can definitely support, some pranksters decided to install a few swings on a BART train the other night. Laughing Squid has the details.
It’s cool—very cool—that the White House is publishing photos on Flickr giving the world a nice view into the activities of the President. But, really Flickr, can we get some metadata with those resized photos, yet? You know, that thing I’ve blogged about before. Date, time, creator information. The kind of stuff that would be useful if a copy of these digital images turns up somewhere else in a few dozen years.
