Photo Assignment: In the Shadows of Light

Backlit subjects, quiet moments, and the joy of rediscovering forgotten photographs.

As a photographer, I’ve always been drawn to how light works, fascinated by how it casts shadows and how putting a subject between you and a light source creates an image that is a silhouette or at least a reasonable facsimile.

I’ve been scanning old slides and negatives for the past few weeks. While I have hundreds (probably thousands) of images to re-scan, seeing them again has been a wonderful experience. Yeah, a lot of them are not great. Many are not worthy of more than a glance and a slight memory of when I might have taken it.

But many of the images I’ve been revisiting are fun and give me joy. In rescanning every negative and slide I have ever taken, I’m taking steps to ensure everything is digital. I have a better scanner than when I scanned a few thousand of them fifteen years ago. I’m more scrupulous about ensuring the physical material is as clean as possible. It’s not perfect, and I’m still disappointed when bits and pieces of dust or lint crop up, but I can at least clean them up in Photoshop if the image is worth it.

In doing this project, I’ve come across many images that are essentially pictures of people and things that are silhouettes. Backlit subjects show them in a different light (no pun intended).

Beyond the old scans, I’ve gathered a few more recent images of silhouettes to mix some new with the old.

Let’s jump in:

I captured this first image in 2017 when my buddy and I were on our annual golf trip to Monterey. There’s a place just south of San Francisco where we stop, have a sandwich, and look out from a spot high above the ocean. Some other tourists came along, and I grabbed my iPhone and snapped:

Late last month, I was tooling around east of Salem with my camera, looking for anything that struck my fancy, when I turned to face the late afternoon sun:

Here’s another from that same day:

A few decades back, I was on a solo trip through northern California and jaunted up and over the pass east of Yellowstone to Mono Lake. I was fascinated by the tufa that had grown in the lake, and it made for some fun photographs. I’d been there once before for a brief, but this time, as the sun set, I stuck around for a few hours, waiting to see what kind of images I’d get:

Another shot from the 80s: I was road-tripping up the Columbia River and came across this scene with the setting sun at Bonneville Dam:

Here’s one of a lone figure standing in the distance on a rock outcropping at the Oregon Coast:

In ’87 and ’88, I lived with a roommate in a 100-year-old farmhouse a few miles outside Hillsboro. There was a wishing well in the yard (actually, probably an old filled-in real well), and the country and farmhouse made for some interesting photos:

Finally, an image from downtown Portland, sometime in the ‘80s. I captured this one showing the silhouettes of the downtown skyline as a dynamic sunset unfolded:

That was a fun assignment! I'll be back with the next photo assignment in three weeks (unless I come up with something else in photography!).