Against the Light
I spent a few days in Breda visiting the city. I mostly walked through Valkenberg, the largest city park there, to see what I could do with light and dark.
In a park like that, you have a lot of trees that create shaded spots when the sun is shining. A fun thing to photograph is the play of light and dark, of sunlight and shadow. You wait until someone passes by, until that person is walking right in the sunlight. Their head, their upper body, or at least part of their body is lit, while other parts of the photo are in shadows. That gives a nice contrast. I took a few photos like that.
Further along the road, I saw another interesting shot. About a hundred meters away, a man was sitting on a bench listening to music, which you could tell from the AirPods in his ears. From my point of view, behind the man on the bench, there was a fountain bathing in sunlight. Because the light came from behind the fountain, I was shooting against the light. That turned the man and the bench into a silhouette, while the fountain was full of light. This is the opposite of the earlier photos: here the person is dark and the background is bright. Behind the fountain you see the trees, half of them still in green leaf, but already showing discolored leaves because it’s autumn. And to top it off: because light was shining on the fountain water, a small natural rainbow appeared in the photo.
Before I could take the photo, I had to come a bit closer. As so often as a photographer, you literally leave the beaten path. I walked onto the grass. I had a prime lens (a lens that doesn’t zoom) on my camera, so I had to get closer to fill the frame. Luckily the man stayed seated and I could take the photo as you see it below.
There are two contrasts in this photo. The one between light and dark, and the one between the seasons: leaves that are still green on one side, discolored leaves on the other, the change from summer to autumn. That second contrast only struck me later.
Since I started photographing earlier this year, I notice that I try more and more to find the right light. I think that worked out here in a colorful way. Colorful because of the trees, the discolored leaves and the rainbow. And at the same time dark because of the silhouette of the man and the bench he’s sitting on.
Playing with the light like this in photos is pretty fun. There is still much to learn about photography and I'm looking forward to do just that over the coming months.