Last night I revisited a lighting trick I played with a few weeks back, and it felt good to push it further. I set up a focused light and let it shine across the leaves, the way moonlight grazes a surface. That shallow angle made the edges flare and the veins glow—almost “Avatar,” but in my favorite photo technique: black and white.
Working in monochrome keeps things simple. No colors to rescue a weak frame—just light and form. In this window-frame set, each square earned its place by how the light sculpted it.
The upper left is all about shine versus shadow; the leaves look lacquered, then drop abruptly into black. On the right, a single blade curves like a sail, its ribs catching light line by line. Below, the light pours through thin fronds until they look translucent, while the foreground remains into darkness like a framing. The last frame shows a web of veins, where the highlights appears to every edge as if drawn with a silver pen.
I didn’t rely on heavy edits—mostly raised highlights, lowered blacks, and let the in-camera glow do the heavy lifting. That’s what I love about this experiment: it’s a real-world effect. You feel the light because it was actually there, shining to those surfaces, not just painted on by software.
Most of all, it was fun. A simple night exercise turned into four small studies on how light changes the mood of living things. I’ll keep exploring this glowing look with different angles and intensities, but for now, I’m happy with these little night discoveries.
~ Andri Cauldwell
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