It would seem appropriate to start this blog with a post where I’m showing my first ‘serious’ picture. It was also my first assignment in my first year at the Photo Academy.

Until then I took pictures for fun like sunsets, landscapes, my family and of course my pet cat! Actually I’m still taking photos of my cat, but that’s another story for another post. But now I had to photograph something that had a so called ’theme’. And the theme of the assignment was ‘light’. I had to take pictures of light?

Well if you think about it, it’s rather ridiculous! How can you take pictures of something you can not actually see? Sure, if you turn on the light in a dark room for example, you can actually see the objects that are in the room, but light itself? You can see a chair because light bounces off it and reflects into your eye. But how can you catch something on film (or more likely a sensor) that has no visible property by itself?

I had to resort to something more symbolic. I came up with a more spiritual solution: “The light of God”. I would take a photo of a crucifix that was enlightened by the power of the divine.

If you look at the picture you can see a floating crucifix above a ‘bible’. In fact it’s not a bible at all, because I did’t own one at the time. Instead I took an encyclopedia, and placed it beneath the crucifix which I had stuck with velcro tape on the wall.

Most people think this picture is photoshopped, but it was not (sure I tweaked it a little, with some levels adjustments), instead I used a flashlight to light the scene and everything was done in one take. It took me about 20 attempts to ‘paint’ the scene correctly. And here’s the result.