Alister Benn - It’s all about Luminosity & Contrast

Thanks George for your feedback. I’m an Expressive Photographer, I care about emotional responses rather than technical definitions. If you watch the conversation I have with Guy cal on the Vision & Light series on my YouTube channel, you will see that he and I had a similar discussion where he was pinning me down on the technical definition of Luminosity. (I studied Astronomy & Astrophysics,so I’m pretty familiar with the technicalities.)

However, what I meant in the presentation at 21:05 (bearing in mind that I am talking to a computer screen and not to the dozens of people watching) - is that we feel brightness, contrast, texture and clarity. There is a tactile or emotional relationship with them. What I want to get across in my processing is not technical niceties, but the emotional consequence of changes of these properties within a frame.

I apologize if you feel misled by the title, or indeed if you didn’t learn anything from it.

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Thanks Phillip, I always appreciate your comments and it’s great to see you here. It is truly a fabulous community.

You are most welcome, thank you very much for your kind words.

Alister,

Thanks for responding and I meant no offense. I do understand the emotional response to images. But being the technical person I am (retired but was a Quality Assurance Analyst for over 20 years) I sometimes have need to understand technicalities. I know the emotional response to an image is visual but can’t that visual response be explained technically, too? Just asking not judging.

Best regards,

George

Thanks so much for your reply, and I was actually a little worried my tone was a bit too defensive. I feel relieved that we’re good.

I kind of figured you had a technical background :slight_smile:

Luminosity isn’t the technically best word for what I talk about here, brightness is more functional, but I find the word luminous so much more onomatopoeic! The key I feel is developing transitions: Dark to Light, Texture to atmosphere, cool to warm etc. All of those result in a “contrast” - a change, a difference.

Thanks again for your engagement - if you haven’t bought it yet, send me your email address and I’ll email you a copy of Luminosity & Contrast.

Yes Sir, I get it. Luminosity is technically light emitted and brightness is light reflected. It’s like using the meter in your camera versus using a handheld meter. Your camera measures reflected light and your flash meter measures light falling on to it. Thus the difference between 50% and 18% gray. But I get what you’re saying. Being an old school person, i.e. film days, I still have a book by Bahman Farzad “The confused Photographer’s Guide to Photographic Exposure and the Simplified Zone System”. The books goes into way more detail on the zone system than most today’s photographers care to know or learn.

David, I just wanted to thank you again for all of your efforts to bring these webinar to us here at NPN. There is so much useful information being provided, at least for me. There is no way I would be able to attend a workshop of this caliber. This really means a lot to me. Thank you.

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I love to hear that Linda! I’m working on many more to come :slight_smile:

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Just made my day, thanks again. Take care.