In photographic theory, we are normally taught to avoid harsh light, that casts hard shadows and creates washed out colours; essentially, avoid the middle of the day, especially if it’s not cloudy. It makes sense, however it is all relative to the purpose. Sure, if you want to shoot portraits outside, either create your own light or avoid such conditions. Also, if you want to shoot landscapes, better stick to early morning or sunset, where light has warm colours and creates all kinds of subtle transitions in the clouds and on the ground.

However, if you want to take pictures in the city, harsh midday light with hard shadows and reflections in the glass might be exactly what you want. I actually prefer the harsh but almost horizontal light before the sunset, almost at the golden hour, because it’s easy to find motives where the light shines through leaves or grass or whatever, and makes everything glow as if the light comes from within.

It doesn’t work that well when the light is vertical, so high noon is to be avoided still, but there’s still that period when the sun is low enough that it passes through flowers and leaves almost horizontally, but strong enough to create light that would conventionally be deemed too harsh for photography. However, if you use sun the way you would normally use a lightbox, to pass light through almost-transparent things in order to make them glow, that would work just fine.

As for the shadows, sometimes I actually want them, and the light that makes them is the actual subject of my photo, and the thing formally chosen as a motive is chosen merely to showcase it, and has no particular meaning as such. The fact that I take pictures of flowers or pine cones or leaves doesn’t mean that I particularly care for them; they are merely elements I use to portray atmosphere and feeling.

Sure, light sometimes casts harsh shadows, and for some types of photography you want to avoid that; portraits, for instance. You don’t want shadows on your model’s face. However, if light and atmosphere are the subject matter, sometimes shadows are what you actually want, and they are what makes the picture.

So, there might be no such thing as bad light; only bad light for certain things. Some photographers consider blue sky and a clear day terrible conditions for landscape photography, because one tends to create boring “postcards” in such conditions, instead of the mood and character you get from the clouds and so on. I kind of agree, but to me it only means you need to get more creative and dismiss the easy shots everyone would get first; take those pictures just to get them out of your system and delete them later, but once you get past the obvious, you might get all kinds of ideas about things to shoot in harsh light and a washed-out hazy blue sky.

Yesterday I finally took that picture of the little St.Luke church and the nice new house nearby that fit very nicely in the landscape, from the road above. I’ve been planning to do something about it for years already but the vantage point is such that you can take the shot only with a telephoto, and since I didn’t have one I planned on sending a drone, but I didn’t want to disturb people with it in season, and out of season it was either cloudy or windy, and so for one reason or another it always got postponed.

The crow on top of the church is a nice accidental detail that made me chuckle due to symbolism. 🙂

It feels nice to check those boxes.

I also went to the nearby abandoned hotel that went to ruin after some succession failure after the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the sight is horrifying, because it didn’t just go to ruin like Pripyat, because it was abandoned. No; the locals systematically broke every piece of glass, every piece of furniture, spray-vandalised the walls, and even brought in old car tyres and who knows what other waste to dispose of here. It looks as if the Orcs came and made a point in destroying everything and making it as ugly as possible in a manifestation of their consciousness and choices.

It doesn’t look post-apocalyptic, in a sense where nature takes over human cities after humans are gone. I’ve seen such places, where the nature reclaims its own and the feeling is always calm, restful and beautiful. No, this is not like that; there’s a Mad Max post-civilisation look to it, the way things must have felt after the fall of Rome, where the barbarians plundered everything that wasn’t bolted to the walls, and then set the rest on fire, or scrawled some illiterate nonsense on the walls, smeared shit on temple altars, and then gradually used stone from old buildings of forgotten meaning to build their unsophisticated primitive stuff.

That’s why I felt the symbolism of that crow on the church so strongly, as if it were a sign.