The Language of Light

Overview
Experience & Creative Vision
Scene Evaluation and Image Taking
Processing & Expression
Products
Personal Tuition

Overview

The Language of Light is another course that has taken a long time to get into the marketplace. It has been evolving and developing in my head and on paper for a few years now, but I can see light at the end of the tunnel.

The concept is quite simple – Photography is a visual language, we use our images to communicate to someone else about an event or experience that we had. The impact the image has on the viewer is a measurable reflection of how effective we have been in our communication.

Throughout the course, I use words like “visual vocabulary, articulation and punctuation.” This is a course founded in experience and vision, through Evaluation of the Scene, to realeasing our vision through the processing and final Expressive Image.

It is a three stage process, endlessly linked and tied, each phase offering a reflective element allowing us to evaluate our own work to gauge our success. This is not a short journey, it can last your entire life.

Experience & Creative Vision

Every image starts with an Experience; a visual stimulus that makes us take our camera out of our bag and attempt to record that event to share with another person.

The first stage of the course is to study these visual and emotional stimuli and begin to recognise ones that are best preserved as memories, and the ones that can be made into expressive photographs.

We study Light, Subjects, Patterns, Shapes, Colours, Emotions and Meaning.

Scene Evaluation and Image Taking

The first and second phases blend into each other and cannot effectively be separated, because part of the Creative Vision as a Photographer, is the ability to Evaluate a Scene to determine its potential effectiveness as a two-dimensional photograph.

But, the Scene Evaluation takes us into a large part of the course, techniques for gathering the light necessary for us to carry into the third part of the course – processing.

This is why the course is holistic – all three phases are connected. Experienced photographers are thinking about the image capture processes and the processing potential at the same time as they are receiving the first visual stimuli as they walk through the world.

For scene evaluation we consider things like Subject Isolation, Clutter, Perspective and Story-telling. From a technical point of view we learn to effectively evaluate a scene to determine our exposure needs, whether the scene can be recorded with a single exposure or if multiple exposures are required; to handle the dynamic range and any depth of field issues that may be involved.

Processing & Expression

By the time you get back to your computer, it is too late to worry about having messed up at the time of capture. The light that you have is all you’ve got. There are ways and means available to “rescue” images, but there is no substitute to getting it right when you’re taking the images.

In this section we consider the Digital Workflow – from evaluating your images and doing initial work before RAW file conversion.

Our main tool however is Photoshop, and I teach the use of CS5.

Effective processing is no different from effective image capture, it is the implementation of tools, tricks and techniques to get the result you are looking for. We are not handing the image over to the computer, we are totally in control of our creative process.

The idea of this stage is to create an image that represents how we felt when we were recording the scene. This is the end point of our expressive journey – We have used the Language of Light to Tell our Stories, to share an experience and a thought that we had because of a visual or emotional stimulus.

Products

The Language of Light Course is still in production. It is still many months from completion due to its scale and complexity.

Personal Tuition

While eBooks and online courses can go a long way to teaching a subject, there is no substitute to being out there with someone who can teach you face to face. We live in a glorious place with amazing cultures, landscapes and people.

I am available in Lijiang, Yunnan for one to one workshops covering any aspect of the Language of Light content, from short 4 hour, half-day sessions, to longer courses over many days.

For further details and terms & Conditions, please see the Personal Tuition Section of this site.