A little while ago, I decided to try my hand at a bit of Painting with Light, reawakening my interest in photography, which was sadly waning. Little did I know how much there was to think about – there is certainly more to it than meets the eye.
As I have been going along, I have been writing blog posts showing my progress and detailing my findings. It now totals 14 separate posts and there are many more planned. Therefore I have put together a section of this website dedicated to them, and listed in order so that anyone interested can follow along.
It is called, unsurprisingly, Painting with Light, and a link to it can be found in the top menu bar. Each post, of course, will still appear on the front page as well.
The feature shot, ‘Blank Canvas‘ was inspired, in part, by my image taken in Story behind the shot: The Art Journal and partly by a prop that I’ve had in my studio for some years. Art, particularly painting, has been in my family for as long as I can remember. My grandfather used to sketch all the time (see Story behind the shot: Sketches of Yesteryear), my grandmother painted, and so did my father (who was formally trained). This skill seems to have passed me by – although maybe my photography is the link in my genes.
Anyway, back to that prop, it is a pot used to store artists’ brushes. I have a collection of brushes stored in it, and so my idea was to have the pot and brushes next to an artist’s easel containing a blank canvas. I also have a small artist’s palette which, although well-used, would fill the foreground.
In reality, the easel was just too tall and would have left too much empty space at the top of the image. However, I did find a palette knife which I added to the scene to act as a leading line.
Hopefully, it is clear what is the hero of the shot and what is the supporting cast, although you may wonder why I have pointed the leading line of the palette knife to the canvas and not the pot. This is because I have used a compositional tool called The Fibonacci Spiral.
The Fibonacci Spiral is based on a mathematical formula known as the Golden Ratio. I won’t bore you with the details (you can easily find the explanation by searching on the internet) but this spiral occurs naturally in anything from the Milky Way, to snail shells, to the water running down the plughole in your bath. The interesting thing for photographers (or artists), is that it is a naturally pleasing way for the human eye to operate. Subconsciously, when you look at something, you don’t just look straight at it, you survey the scene first before focussing on the main point of interest – and studies of the eye have shown that this surveying of the scene follows the path of the Fibonacci Spiral.
If you use Lightroom in your post-processing workflow, you will find that the Fibonacci Spiral is one of the crop overlays. When you choose the crop tool in the Develop module, press the letter O and it will cycle through 9 different compositional guides, one of which is the aforementioned spiral. The position and orientation of the spiral may not be correct for your particular image and so if you press Shift + O it will cycle through all of the available options (8 in total).
Footnote: This was literally the last set of shots that I took with my Pentax medium format set-up before I sold it off and moved to my present Micro Four Thirds camera/lens combo. Fortunately, painting with light doesn’t necessitate the need for large sensor sizes and huge image resolutions, as I hope to show in later posts in this series.
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