Bad light is the best teacher

My first years in photography happened almost entirely in the dark. Clubs, bars, dance floors at three in the morning - places where the light gives you nothing. No softbox, no one to hold a reflector for me. I had a fast lens, a steady hand and an eye that learned, frame by frame, to read the dark.

Good light makes you lazy. Bad light forces you to become a photographer.

The dark doesn't forgive

In a club you can't ask anyone to repeat the moment. The couple kissing under the strobe, the DJ throwing his hands up, the girl laughing for a second - it happens once. Miss the exposure and you've missed the memory. Those years taught me to think in ISO, aperture and shutter speed without looking at the camera. It becomes reflex, like changing gears in traffic.

And they taught me to use what little there is. A red neon above the bar, a spotlight sweeping the floor, the screen of a phone raised in the crowd - all of them are light sources. A good photographer doesn't wait for perfect light. He finds the light that exists and puts it to work.

What I carry into daylight

Today I also shoot portraits in soft afternoon light, and food on a clean, controlled background where I can place the light exactly where I want it. But the discipline stayed from the clubs. When everything is easy, I go looking for the difficulty myself: a harder shadow, a drier contrast, a frame I have to earn rather than be handed.

Because a photograph that was easy to make shows it. It's correct, it's clean - and it's flat. The ones that end up on the wall are almost always the ones the light didn't want to give me.

The lesson that stays

I don't shoot through clubs every night anymore. But I owe them my eye. Everything I know about catching a moment before it disappears, I learned in places where I wasn't allowed to get it wrong twice.

Bad light was the best teacher I ever had - and I still hear its lesson every time I raise the camera.