Be Inspired to Play with Light

A few posts ago, I talked about looking at things from different angles in order to see new inspiring shapes and colors. Another way to make things look different is to adjust the lighting. Adjusting lighting can create interesting shadows and colors. Depending on your subject, it can look totally different in the sunlight than it does under a lamp. As usual, I'll use some of my photos to better express what I am trying to get across to you.

I started a new reward system for the boys that involved using a large quantity of marbles.I had them all stored in a plastic container and set them on my desk under my lamp. What I saw excited me. The reflection of the lamp created a great "eye" effect. Suddenly a bunch of marbles with eyes were staring back at me. I was intrigued. I started moving the lamp around to see how different the marbles would look with the light shining from different angles. Here's what I saw:















Notice how the colors changed as the light source moved. As you can imagine, I took a ton of pics of these marbles as I continued to experiment with light, so this will have to be a 2 part post. Next we'll look at how they look in bright sunlight.

Now find a subject, grab a light source and get experimenting. As always, feel free to share your results. I'm afraid most of my readers are very shy (I know you're out there, I see you in my stats), but don't be afraid to link to your photos or artwork. I'd love to be able to share some of your ideas, photos and creations too!