Natural light photography. Or, discovering things you never thought about..

This morning I started to explore something I never really thought about.

As someone who mainly does bird photography and landscapes (sometimes) as a hobby, the goal is always getting the main subject in focus. The rest of the image is just background usually.

I saw this video on YouTube about exploring your home for available natural light sources and studying these light sources and how they change during the day. A link to the video is at the bottom of the page.You will find more links in the description of the video on YouTube.

This YouTube video referenced a few artists like Josef Sudek, William Henry Fox Talbot and Tom Baril. Now I am no photographic expert as I haven't had any formal training, so these are quite new names and ideas to me.

So after watching the video and then checking out some online examples of these artists' works I decided to have a go at it.

What follows is some of the photos I ended up with that actually explains a bit how a photograph's focus isn't necessarily the item on the photo, but the way the item is interacting with the light. Today I played around with water in a glass and how it reflects light. 

The first image I captured. Already you can see so much more than just the glass.

Note the lines on the top part of the glass' shadow, but there is no lines on the glass itself. This is caused by the shade-netting outside the glass doors where the light is from. Somehow the lines are captured and reflected in the final shadow.

This image was capture a bit later in the day. The sun was moving behind some clouds and this resulted in softer shadows making the image more toned down. Note how diffused the shadows become.

I must say, I found this quite interesting as I never really thought about the actual light reflected and obscured as the subject instead of trying to get everything in sharp focus and technically "correct".  This just shows how much I have to learn about the "art" aspect of photography.

Thank you for reading and I hope to share some more revelations in the future.
Links:
The Art Of Photography Photo Assignment