Light Makes a Difference

Light is the key to all photography

It can make a soft moody shot, it can make you feel happy or gloomy or even give you a foreboding feeling. It can be dramatic or subtle.

The art is to learn to see this light and then to use it to convey the message you want.
The shots below show you the difference between soft diffuse light and using the emergence of the sun and shadows to produce some more dramatic photos.

Very Fine Grass Head in Flower
The grass in soft light was shot with a lens length that enabled the background to be blurred so the similar toned grass could be separated from the background.
The grass in the strong light is the same type as the one shot in soft light, but taken a week later with light on the grass and shadow behind.

Small Grass Tree Flowers - Xanthorea minor
The first shot was taken in soft light and to get any separation, I photographed against a tree trunk. A week later the early morning light was overcast, so we returned to that track later in the morning. By then, the sun had broken through and was lighting the back of the flower spike. This made the flowers around the spike glow. The bark of the tree was now dark because the exposure was set for the lit flowers on the edge of the spike. The back ground was blurred due to a lowish Depth of Field (f8) and long distance from the flower. 

Shaky Grass
This is the same piece of grass - just shot in different light
The soft light allowed the colour of the shrubs and grass in the background to be revealed, whereas exposing for the stronger lit image causes the shadowed background to go black.