Don’t shoot during the noon day hours on a sunny day! This is a rule we are told over and over: shoot only during the golden light of early morning and late afternoon. While this is generally good advice and can provide wonderful to light to shape and reveal texture and form, the opposite statement, to never shoot during the noonday hours is unnecessarily limiting. Photographer and author David DuChemin, wrote, “there is no such thing as ‘bad’ light, only light that works with or against your intent for [an] image.” Flipping this thought around, bemoaning the light because it doesn’t match your intentions at the moment can mean missing opportunities that may be right in front of you.
After enduring several cloudy days while scouting for my 2017 photo-workshop in Tuscany, we finally woke to clear blue skies and brilliant sunshine. And, while I spent those cloudy days exploring the charming villages of the Val d’Orcia, I was determined to find some new locations for the incredible landscapes in the area, so we headed out for a day exploring the country-side. I found the image above driving along the road near San Quirico just before we stopped for lunch. In a way, it was fortunate that I came upon this image at this time of day… a time of day when traditional wisdom said I should just leave the camera in my bag. This particular image could not have been created at any other time of day; the sun was high in the sky by this time rendering the cypress trees and the curved ridge of the hillside in silhouette, clearly revealing their form. The sharply angled sun created what amounted to side-light across the steep hillside; perfect for revealing the texture and colour of the newly tilled red clay of the Crete Senesi. This red colour was important to reveal since it provides a complement to the deep blues of the sky, and the texture of the red clay is a nice counter point to the softness of the white cloud. Shooting this scene early in the day would have resulted in front lighting, obscuring the texture in the clay hillside and fully illuminating the trees; shot later in the day, the entire hillside would have been in shadow.
The moral to this short tale is that there are lots of opportunities to create images at any time of the day, in any kind of weather: it just takes opening our minds to the possibilities, and letting go of our preconceived notions of what we see and how we should shoot it.
– BPSOP Instructor: Mark English
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