I was quite a purist about it and when
some of the people came in and began
to use flash I thought it was immoral.
Ben ShahnPHOTOGRAPHSare recordings of light. And the photographer has two choices for the type of light to be
recorded—available light and artificial light. The difference between the two is the difference between a comic
ad-libbing in front of a brick wall and an actor performing Shakespeare before an audience of English teachers.
The definition of available light is any lighting—sun, moon, table lamps, street lamps, neon signs, candlelight—any
lighting that the photographer doesn’t add to the scene. Landscape photography is automatically done with available
light. No one yet has a floodlight powerful enough to illuminate a mountain or a prairie. Available light is also the
realm of dark alleys and battlefields. It is the essence of photojournalism, where, in its purest form, the goal of the
photographer is to record reality, to capture a moment as it might have been seen by anyone who happened to be
looking at the same spot the moment the shutter was tripped. At most, the journalist-photographer may use a flash
attachment. But the flash isn’t used to sculpt the subject; it’s there simply to make the subject visible. What is possible
today with Photoshop and other photo editing programs was unthinkable at the highest realms of photojournalism.
When image editing was used to darken O.J.’s face for a magazine cover, the change was berated as visual
distortion—and racism—by traditionalist journalist to whom photography must be truthful before all else.
Step away from photography as journalism, though, and all bets are off. Pinups were airbrushed long before
Photoshop brought digital perfection to the art. Now before photos ever get to the touch-up stage, advertising, fea-
ture photography, portraits, weddings, and other staged pictures are as thoroughly lit as a surgeon’s operating table
and as precisely as a laser beam.
To expose an image sensor or a film for a few hundredths of a second, a studio photographer may spend hours set-
ting up and adjusting lights. A Playboyphoto session of a Russian model documented in Popular Photography &
Imagingdescribes how Arny Freytag used 24 lights to light everything in the shot just so, from separate lights for
each leg to a light dedicated to pumping light on the model’s eyes. It’s not stretching the point to say that in a studio
the photographer’s real work is done with how the subject is posed, dressed, made up, and lit. The actual photog-
raphy is simply a record of the art the photographer has created using the tool of light.
Just as microchips and technology have changed cameras, so have they changed artificial lighting. Not so many
years ago, a flash attachment required that the photographer insert a flash bulb into the center of a reflector for each
shot. Inside the glass bulb was a bundle of filaments that burned intensely—and completely—when electricity seared
through it. Today flash attachments and studio lights don’t simply provide light, they provide the right shade of light
with the correct color temperature for as long, as short, or as many times as a photographer needs it. Here’s a
glimpse of how the photographer controls the light with god-like brilliance and intensity.
CHAPTER 6 HOW TECHNOLOGY LETS THERE BE LIGHT^85