Creative Exercise: Photography and Light

Last week’s creative exercise asked you to look at your favorite photos from the previous year and analyze the use of lenses. This week’s exercise takes a different approach and asks you to look at the light and what you can learn from it. I’ll show you how it works by analyzing my own photos.

Creative Exercise: Photography and Light

Go through your favorite photos from last year and analyze the type of light used. What can you learn? Does it help you make plans and come up with ideas for your photography in 2026?

A twelve month period works lets you see how you used natural light, which changes with the seasons, over the course of the year.

But if it’s helpful you can extend this exercise and look back even further through your photos. It’s all about making it as useful and personal to you as possible.

Photography and light: my year

Looking back over the photos I made last year I can see that I made most of my favorites in soft light. As I mainly photographed gardens and flowers last year, this meant that I was working with two variations of natural soft light – the soft light of a cloudy day and the soft light found in shade on a sunny day. 

I also made successful photos in dappled sunlight and using backlighting.

I can see that I used five types of natural light successfully. 

Soft light on a cloudy day for gardens

I got my best results photographing gardens on cloudy days. The soft light revealed detail without hard contrast. It also let me get creative in Lightroom and add mood to the scene. Here’s an example. I made this photo on a cloudy day in October.

Here’s a photo of the same scene made on a sunny day in April. It has no mood and there’s nothing I can do with it in Lightroom to make it more interesting.

Using soft light, especially in autumn, also helped me create moody photos like these.

Soft light cloudy on a day for close-ups

The soft light on a cloudy day is perfect for making close-up photos of flowers. It gives an even light with no distracting bright spots in the background. It’s good for creating strong, graphic compositions. This type of light helped me make photos like these.

Soft light in shade on a sunny day

I also made close-up photos in shade on sunny days. This type of light has more bite than the murky light of a cloudy day. Sunlight reflects off nearby surfaces into the shade, adding sharpness to the light. Colors and textures have more pop. I made photos like these in this kind of light.

Dappled light on a sunny day

Another type of light I worked in on a sunny day was dappled light, with the flower in shade and the sun shining on some of the background. This is trickier to work with and requires good observational skills to make it work. But this is what you can get.

Backlighting 

On sunny days I also backlighting, with the sun illuminating flowers from behind. Again this is a tricky type of light to work with, but can look spectacular when it works. I only used backlighting a little, but would like to experiment with it more.

What I learned

The idea of this exercise is to help you identify what types of light helped you create your best photos over the last twelve months. It also helps you see what types of light didn’t work. With this knowledge you can double down on working in the type of light that gave your best results.

This is an essential part of planning your photographic year. For example, if you’re planning a trip away somewhere for photography, what time of year is likely to give you the best light? 

In my case, I made plenty of photos of gardens in the spring, but it was during a period of sunny weather and the photos weren’t as moody and evocative as those made in late summer and early autumn. 

This knowledge will help me plan 2026 better. Based on what I’ve learned from these creative exercises, I’m going to visit and photograph more gardens, and make more close-up photos of flowers. I’m going to work predominantly in black and white, and use my 100mm macro lens for most of my close-up work. 

Light is the final piece of the puzzle. In the right circumstances, I can work with hard light in black and white (if the subject is right). But, on a sunny day, I won’t waste time making photos of gardens. Instead I’ll search for patches of shade and make photos of flowers using the soft light. I’ll save the garden photos for cloudy days and autumn’s moody colors and light.

I’ll also reach out to the owners of several nearby gardens and see if I can get permission to make photos in the evening, during the golden hour, when the gardens are closed. I didn’t do that this year, so I didn’t get to take advantage of this beautiful type of natural light.

100 Composition Assignments

If you liked the ideas in this article then why not challenge yourself with my ebook 100 Composition Assignments? It’s like a workshop in your pocket, with 100 assignments to light a fire and help you improve your composition skills.

Click here to learn more or buy the ebook