Chapter 7 Making Light Work for You 215 But how often can you count on such luck? Ansel Adams, producer Samuel Goldwyn, and golfer Gary Player have all been credited with originating the phrase, "The harder I work, the luckier I get." If you work at learning what light can do, and how to use it, you'll find yourself becoming luckier too. Knowledge, patience, and the ability to use the lighting tools at your disposal are the keys to great lighting. Ansel Adams was known for his patience in seeking out the best lighting for a composition, and he did actually say, "A good photograph is knowing where to stand." You have to possess the ability to recognize effective lighting when it is already present, and have the skill to manipulate the light when it is not. One of my favorite stories is about photographer George Krause, who spent the early part of his career shooting photographs only on overcast days, under diffuse, low-contrast illumination. That kind of lighting can be exceptionally challenging, because there is no interplay of highlights and shadows to add depth to a composi- tion. Only when Krause was convinced that he understood soft lighting did he move on to work with more dramatic applications of light. Check out Krause's Shadow, taken in Seville, Spain more than 40 years ago at http://georgekrause.com/gallery/ streetDetail.php5?SHADOW-2. Does the photo show an old woman--or an old woman followed by a dark secret? Continuous Lighting--or Electronic Flash? Continuous lighting is exactly what you might think: uninterrupted illumination that is available all the time during a shooting session. Daylight, moonlight, and the artifi- cial lighting encountered both indoors and outdoors count as continuous light sources (although all of them can be "interrupted" by passing clouds, solar eclipses, a blown fuse, or simply by switching a lamp off ). Indoor continuous illumination includes both the lights that are there already (such as incandescent lamps or overhead fluorescent lights indoors) and fixtures you supply yourself, including photoflood lamps or reflec- tors used to bounce existing light onto your subject. The surge of light we call electronic flash is produced by a burst of photons generated by an electrical charge that is accumulated in a component called a capacitor and then directed through a glass tube containing xenon gas, which absorbs the energy and emits the brief flash. Electronic flash is notable because it can be much more intense than con- tinuous lighting, lasts only a brief moment, and can be much more portable than sup- plementary incandescent sources. It's a light source you can carry with you and use anywhere. Your Sony Alpha DSLR-A850, as a "pro" camera, does not incorporate a flip-up built- in electronic flash. Instead, you'll have to work with an external flash, either mounted on the Alpha's accessory shoe or used off-camera and linked with a cable or triggered by a slave light (which sets off a flash when it senses the firing of another unit). Studio flash