Weekly Photography Challenge – Shadows

A Post By: Darlene Hildebrandt

Early I shared an assortment of shadowy images. I love playing with light and photographing shadows is a great way to help you learn to see light, and direction of light. Here are a few more examples:

By mgstanton

By Life Pilgrim

By Daniela Hartmann

This week’s photography challenge is all about the shadows. So head out and look for some light that creates interesting shadows. For a shadow image to work well you need a couple of things:

1. A hard light course like direct sun. You cannot find good shadows on an overcast or cloudy day.
2. Light that skims the surface like the late evening or dusk kind. Look for the long shadows at the end of the day (or first thing in the morning) they will add more drama to your images.
3. An interesting and well defined subject. For a shadow to be interesting the viewer needs to be able to identify and connect with the object producing the shadow, even if the object isn’t in the photo itself. Some things that work particularly well are trees, bicycles, people, a fence, etc.

Let’s see a few more examples that are well done:

By Michael

By Angelo Domini

By Harris Hui

By Broo_am (Andy B)

By Seema Krishnakumar

By Grozz

By Camil Tulcan

By Mark Anderson

By David Rodriguez Martin

By hapal

By Magdalena Roeseler

You can see by the images above that even tiny things like a seed can produce a great shadow. Find some ordinary household objects, put them in the sun, and see what the light does to the shadow. Try rotating it or moving around it.

Another idea is to do a self portrait using your own shadow. See how creative you can get with that. Throw your shadow on a wall, do a crazy pose, or get your camera in the shadow too. Mix it up, let’s see what you got! Humor is good too!

By Dustin Diaz

By gian?merz

By Claudio Cicali

By Volodymyr Pavlyuk

By BMiz

By Sherwood411

Share your images of shadows

Simply upload your shot into the comment field (look for the little camera icon in the Disqus comments section as pictured below) and they’ll get embedded for us all to see or if you’d prefer upload them to your favourite photo sharing site and leave the link to them. Show me your best images in this week’s challenge.