SHE, THE MAGNIFICENT by THE PORTUGAL WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER
A wedding photographer’s theory of light, with photographs of the bride getting ready at the Grande Villa Real Italia Hotel
My theory of light for wedding photographers and others. It may not have a scientific basis, but I assure you that it is so:
My theory of light
“Let’s take advantage of the fact that the light is just right. We can’t do it now because the light isn’t right. Let’s go because the light’s not good today. What a wonderful light, let’s enjoy it before it goes away. The light there was the best. Anyway, anyone who is close to photographers knows these kinds of phrases in their conversations. Whether you’re a landscape, advertising, fashion or sports photographer, light is your main ingredient and can be your best friend or your worst nightmare.
How it is used
However, light can be completely different things depending on how you use it and what you want from it. It can ensure that bread is earned in the countryside from sunrise to sunset, as those who make their living from the ground do. It can decide what colors the painter uses to wet his brush so that, on the canvas, he can sow like his colleague from the countryside who was early to the light.
The animal can decide if it’s time to go to life because it too has learned to make use of it or the lack of it. If an eagle or leopard likes it strong and bright, owls and hyenas prefer it dim or none at all.
On the other hand, we have the light of scientists. These are the ones we turn to when we don’t understand anything about the subject, in our heated discussions, we make sure they have it proven and, with that, we put our position out of the discussion, even if what they have proven exactly passes us by a little because when these gentlemen and ladies tend to explain, it seems that they use a language that is not quite of this world and we need to go to a special school to understand them, or else be a regular on the specialty television channels.
Scientist stuff
These men and women say that light is an electromagnetic wave and that rays propagate in a straight line, which seems strange to me because whenever I go to the beach I only see curved waves, I’ve never seen any in a straight line and I don’t think light waves are any different. That’s why scientists have always seemed to me like people with heads that came from another world.
Now, and it’s not because I’m in the middle of it, I think it’s the photographers who should be right, because not only do they need it to make their crop, but they’re always commenting on how the light is in each other’s work: how well you took advantage of the light, great luck with the light, I was waiting until the light was at the right angle, etc, etc and etc. That’s why it’s they, the photographers, who should know.
A photographer’s warning
I’d like to warn you now that their ideas about light may seem strange to anyone who doesn’t wander around this world of people who have cameras and lenses on their backs and are capable of anything because of it. They can get up at dawn to be in a certain place because the light there is good only at that time, and when they arrive, they turn back because it didn’t want to please them today.
They are also capable of building things worthy of architects, or birds that make strange nests, to make the light reach them in a way that satisfies what they have in mind, and they can’t imagine how many things they are capable of doing because of the light.
As one of them, I have no reason to doubt that there are three types of light: low light, medium light, and high light. In other words: dark and light or night and day and something in between. High light has to do with that uncomfortable part where the lucky camera buyer is very disappointed because they are left with a part of the image, which they have put so much effort into, burnt out, it’s just white.
Light in layers
Unfortunately for him, the camera, on his retina, doesn’t embrace all the light like ours does and this causes a lot of problems so that the expert photographer is forced to make the necessary maneuvers to tame it. Imagine that for someone who is just starting to go crazy.
This is where I think scientists don’t know anything about the subject because no matter how many times I think about it, I can only understand that light can’t come in waves or in a straight line, waves in a straight line, I repeat, what a hell of an idea, but in layers.
Bearing in mind what photographers say about light, for me, who studied the subject for many years my images amazed me, not because of what I was doing but because of what the light left behind, and when I analyzed those almost lightless, deep black, but with turned movement over ups and downs, dimples and beaks, round curves and sharp angles, straight and wavy lines offered to me in the right third, out of respect for the rule, it was to the delight of my eyes, iridescent muse in a poet’s poem.
The joy of light and photographers
After thinking so many times as the universe has infinity, I had to conclude that the lights, for photographers, fall in very thin layers, like that pastry dough in Tentúgal, which is so thin that you need a lot of it to make a cake that takes us miles to taste it.
First the layers of black lights, then the ones that look like those just before sunrise or sunset, then the other brighter ones that make you close your eyes if you look at them suddenly, until, when they are all on top of each other, they complete the image that gives so much pleasure to those who make them and sometimes to those who see them.
It may not be like this in scientists’ laboratories, but I can assure you that this is how it works inside my cameras. It’s all so fast, only cameras can capture it, and we don’t notice. But surely it can’t be any other way. Because…
That’s the only way to explain what astonishingly comes out of the cameras of some photographers. In order to achieve the wonders that are enchanted with what has been left in the dark background of their cameras.
Photographers know that they always have to deal with the reality that is the world’s strongest allegory and that gives it form and life: light.”
- In Hotel Grande Real Villa Itália, Cascais, Portugal
