My creative lesson 26 — Sometimes a flashlight is just a flashlight OR sometimes apples are red

27 June, 2020

The challenge for this week at 52frames.com was to use a flashlight. We could use the flashlight as a lightsource or take a photo with some type of flashlight in the photo.

I thought that I was being extremely unoriginal this week with my ‘Single red apple against black background’ photo. There are thousands of these types of photos — with every single type of fruit or veggie that exists in the world.

Together with my unoriginal subject, I didn’t even use a snazzy multi-light, multi-colored flashlight. Just the inbuilt flashlight on my cell phone.

I was totally okay with NOT being super creative and thinking out of the box this week. There were red apples in the house and I wanted to work on my low key photography skills. So I did exactly that — I just kept on playing with my camera’s settings and the position of the light until I was more or less satisfied with my photo.

The light source in a photo is very important. Not only does it allow you to make the photo in the first place but the light also helps you to create the atmosphere of the photo and tell a story.

A dark photo full of shadows creates a dramatic and noir-like mystery feeling. And a light photo without any shadows creates a happy and uplifting photo. Also, the direction and strength of the lightsource can influence your photo. This allows you to show wrinkles to point out someone’s age or the rough brick textures of a dark and ominous alleyway…

I often look at movies trying to figure out what the director is ‘saying’ with the light. Is it night or day time in the scene? How does the light highlight, play with or hide a character’s face? Sometimes the strong light washes out skin color telling us that we are in the desert or it is high noon. Other times the light points towards a clue that we must notice.

One can say so much with light without actually SAYING it. The visual version of a that very true piece of writing advice of:

“Show it, don’t say it.”

Which brings us back to my photo this week…what is the light telling us?

And to be honest, I do not think that it is saying or pointing out anything. Maybe the light accentuates the stripy pattern of the apple. Or maybe it is actually the absence of light that is talking in this photo. The dark contrasts against the red color to say:

“The apple is red.”

And that is all.

As I took through the photos that I have taken so far, I noticed that the photos are becoming more and more minimalist.

Minimalist photos usually remove everything that is unnecessary to make you focus on that one single piece of truth.

Isn’t it amazing that we can do something like that with our photographs? Focusing on that one thing we are exploring as though we are seeing it for the first time. And isolating it in such a manner that anyone else can see it in that way that you see it. Even though the only thing that you are saying is that an apple is red.

It is unoriginal and it is obvious but in this moment, in this photo, the only thing that is true is that the apple is red.

And that is all.

I belong to a photo group called 52Frames where we have to take a photo and upload it every week. (It is 100% free to join but take note that the deadlines are strict.) Plodding along every week getting my weekly photo has taught me a lot about creativity.

Here is the 52Frames’s Flashlight album.