Welcome to my first blog post! 🎉 

Today I want to talk about the ever-so-trendy use of hard light and share some of my new images.

Recently, hard light and the well-defined shadows that it produces have been making waves in product photography. It works especially well on social media, where visual impact is everything, and the engagement window is so short.

But how does it become so effective in this setting?

Well, if we get scientific, it is proven that our eyes are naturally drawn to areas of the highest tonal contrast and also to diagonal lines.

When we scroll through Instagram and are flooded with tons of content competing for our attention, a “jump out of the frame” image is sure to yield a better conversion rate than the same image with a softer contrast.

This sheds some light on why this bold, fresh, and playful look is so popular, and why these summertime-like sharp shadows are so effective in grabbing our attention.

So, in answer to the question of the day, hard light, with appropriate use, can definitely be one of the sharper tools in your shed.

But to really clamp your audience’s attention with quality content, we’ll need to bring out other tools as well. Stay tuned for the next blog post where we will talk about one of them—it’s a completely different one (nope, not soft light!).

Thanks for reading through to the end. Feel free to share this post with a friend and be sure to check out my full still-life Portfolio.

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Talk to you soon!

Boris