Darkness is juicy

"Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand this too, is a gift.” –Mary Oliver

With photography, we learn to embrace light. With that said, darkness or lack of light can make for perfect condition to make compelling images too. During those dark winter months, I have learned to embrace shooting in the darker conditions when there are less daylight hours. This could be a situation in broad daylight when the natural light is limited, a moody or tonally challenging scene, or even complete darkness both in outdoor and indoor conditions.

When we look around, we tend to look for a light source of some kind, we don’t pay much attention to darkness despite its presence around every corner and just as easily interacts with light in the most beautiful of ways, tonal shifts and darkness can add depths to your images that you didn’t know existed before and it gives your images room for imagination when not everything is reviewed.

Shooting in darkness or shooting darker scenes is a great way of training our senses to be more homed into the feeling of the moment and getting our eye to learn to detect the subtleties of changing light. Even when we are in a pitch-black room, our eyes can adjust to pick out these changes after some time, the same can therefore be achieved with the camera.

To me, photography is not just science. It is an art form that asks of us to listen to our instinct. Stripping away light can make us feel uncomfortable and make it more of a challenge to compose for an image. It also provides us with the opportunity to respond to our senses, and to make images that provoke more questions than to provide answers.