There is No Bad Light

Canon 7D, 17-40L @ 17mm, 1/4 sec, f4, ISO 800, -1.0 stop exposure conpensation, vertical pan blur.

Well that isn't entirely true. Some light is easier to work with than others. You aren't going to get a beautiful landscape image in harsh mid-day sunshine. You just aren't. Sorry. But move into a grove of trees where things are shaded and suddenly you have nice diffused light for making portraits, flower shots, and such.

This morning however, was a challenge. I was walking home after dropping my truck off at the mechanic. It was about 8:30, snowing lightly and only the dim, blue, pre-dawn light was filtering through the flakes and clouds. In short, it was nearly dark. So how do you work with this? There are a number of ways. You could mount a tripod use a long exposure on a low ISO to keep the noise down and hope for the best. But likely the best, using that technique, would be a very blue looking snowy-forest. Not ideal. I was trying to work with how the scene felt to me. Early light here is very blue, I'm cool with that, so I let the camera go to blue without adjusting white balance to compensate. The forests of birches I was walking through always seem very surreal this time of day, kind of spooky even, all blues and whites. I didn't have a tripod, just my 7D and 17-40 f4L lens. So I created blurs. Zoom blurs, vertical and horizontal pan blurs. I jiggled the camera, shook it and spun around as fast as I could to see what kind of image I'd get. This is my favorite. It is a vertical pan blur and I think, in a very abstract way it represents the look of the boreal forest early on winter morning. I also like the way the dark middle almost makes the top and bottom appear like reflections, or a Rorschach test. It takes a moment to grasp what you are looking at, and I like that.

Even bad light has potential if you use it the right way.