Chapter 5 — Exercises

Light is learned by seeing it and shooting it, so these exercises are split between no-camera eye-training (which trains the muscle that matters most) and field shooting (which proves it works). A phone is a perfect camera for every one of these — choosing light costs nothing and works identically on any device. Difficulty is marked ⭐ (warm-up), ⭐⭐ (core), ⭐⭐⭐ (stretch). Do the starred and odd-numbered ones at minimum; model answers and critiques for those are in the book's Answers to Selected Exercises. Keep everything — some of it feeds your Portfolio.

Part A — Reading light (Read the Frame)

Exercise 5.1 ⭐ — Hard or soft? Find five photographs (around you, on your phone, in a magazine, online). For each, look only at the shadow edges and decide: was the light hard (crisp shadows) or soft (graded shadows)? Write one sentence per image naming the quality and the likely source (e.g. "soft — shot under overcast or near a big window"). The goal is to read quality at a glance.

Exercise 5.2 ⭐ — Which direction? For the same five photographs, deduce the direction of the main light from where the highlights and shadows fall (the shadow points away from the source). Label each: front, side, back, top, or under. Note which one felt the most three-dimensional and which felt flat.

Exercise 5.3 ⭐⭐ — Read the color. Find three photographs with an obvious color cast — one warm, one cool, and one neutral. For each, state whether the light was warm/neutral/cool, name a likely source (tungsten lamp, sunset, open shade, midday sun), and say whether the color helps the image or should have been corrected. Defend the warm/cool ones especially.

Exercise 5.4 ⭐⭐⭐ — Reverse-engineer the whole lighting. Choose three images you admire and, from shadows and highlights alone, deduce all of it: direction, quality (hard/soft), color, and how many sources there were. Write your reasoning for each. This is reading light backward from its effects — a core professional skill that improves fast with practice.

Exercise 5.5 ⭐⭐ — Write a Described Photograph, light first. Pick one image with beautiful light and write a full Described Photograph (the six fields), but make THE LIGHT field the longest and most detailed — name the source, direction, quality, color, and exactly where it falls and doesn't. Specificity here is the whole exercise.

Part B — Quality of light (Shoot This)

Exercise 5.6 ⭐ — Hard vs. soft, same subject. Photograph one subject (a face, a piece of fruit, your hand) twice: once in hard light (direct sun or a bare bulb), once in soft light (move it into open shade or beside a big window). Same subject, minutes apart. Compare the shadow edges directly. Caption each with the source and why it was hard or soft.

Exercise 5.7 ⭐⭐ — Make hard light soft. Find a hard light source (a sunny window, a bare lamp) and make it soft without moving the subject to a different room: tape a sheet of baking paper, a white bedsheet, or a thin curtain over it, or bounce it off a big white wall. Shoot before and after. You've just enlarged the effective source. Note how far the shadow edges softened.

Exercise 5.8 ⭐⭐⭐ — The closer-equals-softer demo. Using one window and one subject, shoot the subject (a) right up against the glass and (b) the same subject far across the room from the same window. Keep the source identical — only the distance changes. Observe that the near position is softer. Explain in one sentence why nearness softens light. This is the counterintuitive half of §5.1.

Part C — Direction of light (Five Conditions & Shoot This)

Exercise 5.9 ⭐⭐ — Five Conditions: walk the light around. Take one subject with texture and form and one light source. Make five frames, changing only the direction: front, 45°, full side (90°), backlit, and top (as close as you can get to each). Change nothing else. Lay the five together, self-select the strongest three, and write one line on what each direction said about the subject. (Strong Portfolio candidates may emerge here.)

Exercise 5.10 ⭐ — Texture by raking light. Find a textured surface (weathered wood, a brick wall, sand, a knitted sweater, tree bark) and photograph it twice: once with light raking across it from the side, once with light hitting it head-on (front). Notice how the side light makes the texture leap out and the front light flattens it. This is grazing geometry in action.

Exercise 5.11 ⭐⭐ — Make a silhouette. Find a subject with a strong, recognizable outline (a person, a tree, a chair) and place a bright source directly behind it (a bright window, the sky at sunset). Expose for the bright background so the subject goes black. Make a clean silhouette where the shape alone carries the image. Then make one where you instead expose for the subject and let the background blow out — compare what each says.

Exercise 5.12 ⭐⭐⭐ — Rim light a subject. Backlight a subject with a low sun or bright window behind and slightly above it, then expose for the subject's front (or add fill from anything white). The goal is a glowing rim of light outlining the hair or edges while the face is still visible. This is the most-loved and most technically demanding direction; getting one clean rim-lit frame is a real achievement.

Part D — Color of light & white balance (Settings Drill)

Exercise 5.13 ⭐ — Catch Auto White Balance neutralizing a sunset. Photograph a warm scene (a sunset, a lamp-lit room) with white balance on Auto, then again set to Daylight (or Cloudy). Compare. You'll see Auto neutralize the warmth and Daylight preserve it. Keep both; this is the single most useful white-balance lesson there is.

Exercise 5.14 ⭐⭐ — Settings Drill: warm interior at dusk. Scenario: you're shooting a cozy living room lit by warm lamps, at dusk, and you want it to feel warm and intimate (not neutralized to grey). Write the white-balance choice you'd make and why, plus a starting exposure (mode, aperture, shutter, ISO) given dim indoor light. Explain the trade-offs. (Lean on the exposure triangle from Chapter 3.)

Exercise 5.15 ⭐⭐ — Read mixed light. Find a real mixed-light scene (an office with windows and fluorescents; a room at dusk with lamps on and blue twilight outside; a street at dusk). Photograph it and identify the two (or more) different-colored sources, which one your camera chose to neutralize, and what happened to the other. Decide which source you'd white-balance for and why.

Exercise 5.16 ⭐⭐⭐ — Settings Drill: the same scene, two emotions. Take one scene and deliberately produce two versions using white balance alone: one warm (set WB high / Cloudy / Shade) and one cool (set WB low / Tungsten). Same exposure, same framing. Caption each with the emotion the color choice creates. This proves white balance is a creative tool, not a correctness problem.

Part E — Times of day (Shoot This & Eye Training)

Exercise 5.17 ⭐⭐ — Shoot one golden hour, start to finish. Look up today's sunset time. Arrive at one spot an hour before, and shoot the same scene every ten minutes through sunset and into blue hour. Watch the light go gold, then deep, then blue; the shadows lengthen and soften. Make 20+ frames; keep your best 3 and note what the light was doing in each. This single session teaches more about natural light than any reading.

Exercise 5.18 ⭐⭐ — The overcast portrait. On an overcast day (or in deep open shade), photograph a person. Notice: no squinting, no raccoon eyes, soft flattering light, even skin. Compose to exclude the blank white sky (fill the frame, or shoot a tight portrait). Prove to yourself that "bad" overcast light is actually great portrait light.

Exercise 5.19 ⭐ — The noon shade rescue. At harsh noon, photograph a person in direct sun (raccoon eyes, squinting), then move them ten feet into open shade and shoot again. Same person, thirty seconds apart. The shade version should be dramatically better. This is the most useful thirty-second move in the book.

Exercise 5.20 ⭐⭐⭐ — Blue-hour cityscape. At blue hour (the 20–40 minutes after sunset), photograph a cityscape, a lit street, or any scene where artificial lights glow against a still-deep-blue sky. Hold steady (brace against a wall, prop the phone, or use a tripod) because the light is dim. The goal is warm lights against a cool blue sky — the signature blue-hour balance.

Exercise 5.21 ⭐ — Eye Training: shadow clock. No camera. Pick a fixed spot you can see at three different times today (morning, noon, late afternoon). Each time, note where the shadows fall and how long and hard they are. You're learning to read the sun's path — the foundation of predicting light.

Part F — Finding & predicting light (Eye Training & the Light Log)

Exercise 5.22 ⭐ — Start the Light Log. Begin the Light Log from §5.6. Make your first entry today: two or three sentences about some light you noticed — its direction, quality, and color, and what it did to whatever it touched. Then do it tomorrow. No camera required; this is the highest-return habit in the book.

Exercise 5.23 ⭐⭐ — A week of light (Light Log). Keep the Light Log every day for seven days, noting direction, quality, and color each time, plus one line on whether it would make a good photograph. At week's end, read the seven entries together. You'll notice you're now seeing light you used to walk past — that's the muscle growing.

Exercise 5.24 ⭐⭐ — Find the good light in a bad room. Walk into the worst-lit room you have access to and find the one best pocket of light in it (almost always near a window or at the edge of a shadow). Photograph something there. The skill is finding the edge/opening where good light lives, not lighting the whole room.

Exercise 5.25 ⭐⭐ — Predict and arrive. Pick a location and, using a sunrise/sunset/golden-hour app (or just knowing east/west), predict in advance which surfaces will be lit at golden hour and where the shadows will fall. Write the prediction down, then show up and check it. Predicting light is the professional difference.

Exercise 5.26 ⭐⭐⭐ — Bounce fill with no gear. At harsh noon or in hard window light, photograph a face with the shadow side going too dark. Now have a friend hold anything white (paper, foam board, a white shirt) opposite the light to bounce fill into the shadows. Shoot before and after. You've controlled light with zero dollars of equipment.

Part G — The red door & Recreate It

Exercise 5.27 ⭐⭐ — Your red door, golden vs. noon (Portfolio). Find your "red door" — any textured subject that won't move (a weathered wall, fence, tree, building face). Photograph the identical frame at harsh noon and again at golden hour, white balance on Daylight. Compare: flat record vs. glowing photograph. This is your Portfolio Checkpoint; the golden-hour frame enters the Portfolio. Keep the pair together as proof of the chapter's thesis.

Exercise 5.28 ⭐⭐⭐ — Recreate golden-hour backlight. Recreate the look of a classic golden-hour backlit portrait or scene: low sun behind the subject, a warm rim outlining it, flare or glow allowed, warm white balance. Your subject can be anything — a person, a plant, a glass of water (which will glow as the light passes through). Restraint and timing are the challenge; the window is brief.

Part H — Interleaved (mixing prior chapters)

Exercise 5.29 ⭐⭐ — Light + manual exposure (Ch. 3). Shoot a backlit subject in full Manual (Chapter 3). First expose for the bright background (subject goes to silhouette), then re-expose for the subject's face (background blows out). Write down both sets of settings and explain, in terms of the exposure triangle, why one scene needed two different exposures.

Exercise 5.30 ⭐⭐ — Light + depth of field (Ch. 4). Photograph a subject in beautiful golden-hour side light and with a shallow depth of field (wide aperture, background dissolved — Chapter 4). Combine good light (this chapter) with selective focus (last chapter). Notice how the warm light in the soft background bokeh glows. This is two chapters' skills in one frame.

Exercise 5.31 ⭐⭐⭐ — The four-decisions frame (Ch. 1), light-led. Make one photograph in which you consciously decide all four decisions from Chapter 1 (light, moment, frame, focus), but let the light lead — choose the light first (time of day, direction, quality) and build the other three around it. Write one line on each decision. This is the whole of Part I in a single, deliberate image.

Exercise 5.32 ⭐⭐ — Fix the Photo. A described failed shot: "A portrait taken at noon in direct overhead sun. The subject's eyes are lost in black shadow, the top of the head and nose are blown out white, the subject is squinting hard, and the colors look harsh and cool. Auto white balance was on." Diagnose every problem in terms of this chapter, then prescribe the specific re-shoot (where, when, what light, what white balance) that fixes each one.

Stretch challenge

Exercise 5.33 ⭐⭐⭐ — One subject, five lights, one month of seeing. Choose a single subject you can return to (your red door works perfectly). Over two weeks, photograph it in five genuinely different lights: golden hour, harsh noon, overcast, blue hour, and one artificial/mixed light at night. Keep the Light Log running the whole time. Lay the five together at the end. You will see one subject become five different photographs purely through light — the chapter's entire thesis, proven in your own work, plus two weeks of trained seeing in the Log.

Model answers and critiques for the starred and odd-numbered exercises appear in the book's "Answers to Selected Exercises." Try each with a camera (and your eyes) before reading them — in photography, the attempt is the lesson.