This week we'll be talking about probably one
of the most important aspects of photography, which is light.
As in photo-graphy [spoken phonetically],
writing or drawing with light.
It's a very content-rich conversation,
we're going to have, and could really, easily,
take up a full six-week course.
But for our purposes here, we're going
to give you something of an overview,
showing you various forms and characteristics
of some light sources.
We can't address every conceivable possibility.
But what we can do is tweak your curiosity, I hope,
so that you pay attention, very close attention, to what you're
seeing as you change your own light sources,
looking at the shadows for example.
How do they and they and the highlights
change as you move your light source?
And observe exactly what's going on when you make even
some very minimal changes.
Let's start with a very simple piece of equipment, a lightbox.
It's really easy to use when you're
working with transparent material,
just by placing your work directly
on top of the lightbox.
But you'll see also, later, it can
be also another general source of lighting.
So let's start with a picture of these two petri dishes
growing E. coli.
So that works.
In this image, we're seeing small pieces of colored plastic
shapes, about 3 millimeters across that are organizing,
or self-assembling at the interface
between two solutions.
They're becoming a flat assemblage at that interface.
And all I did was put the glass container
holding all the material on the lightbox.
And here, I'm making images of sugar crystals growing
on sticks.
You know, they serve you that sometimes
when you order a cup of coffee.
So here is one rendition on a lightbox of the sugar,
and what I decided to do for the next one
to simply invert the image, which we've seen before.
Here's a picture that I made a number of years ago,
which I still like.
It's a picture about light, a metaphor about light.
It was one of those lucky efforts
when I just set up a magnifier and the paper, [laughs]
and in about 30 seconds, I got the picture!
(Very unusual, by the way!) So the image
is intended to suggest a process of etching with light when
we talked about it in our book No Small Matter,
about nanoscience.
In this image of something I assume you recognize by now,
we see a different kind of lighting
that you've seen from previous images of the music box.
I shot from above with mostly daylight,
and then I turned on a little bit more
light from a Tungsten lamp above.
This is specific to this situation,
but you might find it helpful in yours.
Look what happens when you just simply click and turn
a light on.
From the light being off, to the light being on,
you'll see how the image drastically
changes by just adding an additional lamp
from above this fishing reel.
Yup [laugh], that's what it is, by the way,
it is a fishing reel placed in a translucent, green garbage can.
[laughs] I thought it was fun to see what kind of quality
I could get by shooting into a plastic, translucent garbage
can.
Very specific to say the least.
Again, just by adding one additional light -- this time,
inside the vacuum chamber I'm imaging ' we see what starts
as this kind of image, and becomes this image.
You'll see how it really changes with the simple addition
of just one light.
In this image of a triangular-shaped water drop --
it's actually an etched area on a surface onto which we placed
water ' you can see the reflection of the lamp
on the water drop.
We just directed a lamp onto the water.
That's considered direct lighting.
When I shine the lamp onto a card,
in this case, a gold card, the light then
bounced back onto the water drop and you'll
see a completely different quality of lighting.
This is called bounce lighting.
The bounce gives us diffuse lighting.
Let's compare the two.
Let's look at a quick test that I
made for us to see the difference between two
kinds of bounces.
In this case, the bounce lighting
will used as fill lighting.
We'll use a white card and then we'll fill with a mirror.
The main source of light is daylight from a window.
So, here's an image of the inside of the watch
that we've seen before, just with daylight
on an overcast day.
Here, I added a white card on the side of the watch
for a fill.
Here is a mirror reflecting the daylight, again, as a fill,
onto the watch.
Let's go back to the original 'just daylight'; then the card;
then the mirror; back to the watch alone;
then adding a card; then adding just the mirror.
Let's zoom in to see the subtle differences
in each of these cases.
Now depending on what your material is,
you might see much more dramatic changes.
But I encourage you to experiment with these ideas.
By the way, here's another image I
made, this time using both the card and the mirror as a fill.
Let's see them all together.
Light is all about shadows as well.
And it is quite remarkable how small changes can
change the shadow in images.
How a powerful direct light source
can produce a significant shadow, and that shadow does,
in this image, become a very strong compositional element.
Here's where I'm using the light on this wafer showing
the chip that sits next to it.
In this particular image, I was playing around;
I decided to just use a slant of light -- uh, maybe, uh,
Emily Dickenson would be happy with that.
On this image, I decided just to make
sure the light was covering the entire wafer.
I actually like the first one better,
but it's something to think about,
about using light in terms of making compositions.
In this image, I'm using a shadow
to better communicate what the grading on the surface
of this plastic is doing.
It's diffracting the light into different wavelengths.
I produced the shadow by placing a card
in front of the light source.
See how the image looks without the card.
Shadows alone can tell a story.
Here, we're trying to show something called the Marangoni
effect; you know, when you twirl a glass of wine we see some --
what some people call 'tears of wine'.
It's a complex phenomenon.
In this image, I tried for quite a
while to make an image depicting the Maragoni effect.
Not at all successful.
Finally, thinking that I should concentrate
on the glass, and the shadow that is being produced,
then I finally focused in on what is the Marangoni
effect on its own, as a shadow.
Now, for example, looking at this small assemblage, which
is about two centimeters across, I lit this with one light.
It's a monopoint, it's somewhat of a fiber optic source.
And you could see carefully, if you look at this image,
where does the light source come from,
and hopefully you will figure out that if the shadow is here,
then the light source has to be around here.
In this next one, I added a second light source
that not only lights the device as light to it,
but it also adds another shadow.
And in this next one, the second light source
has been altered in terms of its direction and the height
because the shadow that it casts is slightly longer and even
more so in this final image where
the light, the second light source,
is very low compared to where it was.
And you know that again because the shadow
is considerably longer.
Now, why bother looking at all this?
It really is, once again, learning
to see so that when you play with your own light sources
with your own devices, you're going
to pay not only great attention to lighting of your device,
but the shadows that the lighting will be producing.
It's important.
It might not seem that way at this point, but [laughs],
I promise you, it really is important.