The 90-Percent Rule—Part Five—The Grounds

If you’ve read and understood the first four parts of the 90-Percent Rule, your photography should show great improvement, especially if you’re practicing what you’ve absorbed. The key is pure white reflects 90-percent of the light that hits it and pure black absorbs 90-percent of the light that hits it, or as we say with incident light meters, the light that falls on it.

Where many photographers hear photo editors yelling at them is when they forget that there is more to light then what falls on the subject, there is also light that falls on the back and foreground of the image. While generally we use the “grounds” to accentuate our image in glamour photography, as this type of photography is about the subject and not the grounds, if we’re not careful we’ll also take away from our subject and this is because of the 90-percent rule and lighter-colored objects.

In this article we’ll focus on the white-side of the 90-Percent Rule. Let’s pretend you’ve photographed a top model near a magnolia tree. She’s far enough away where you can compress the background by utilizing a medium-tele to telephoto lens for great compression and the abilities of shooting at a lower aperture to blur the background. It’s a great photo, except one thing, in the midst of the green blobs of mood created by the large green leaves of the magnolia tree and the little bit of light filtering in, you notice one or two large blobs of white. This is what a photo editor will stay away from in an image, especially in an environmental portrait, which some glamour photos can be labeled.

Why will a photo editor hand you a harsh critique for such a beautiful photograph? It’s real simple, because they are trained to spot what appeals to the audience, what makes a photograph, what will keep the reader interested in the story, not what will turn-away readers, not what makes a great photo to enter into a photo contest. They are experts in publication of imagery they study cropping, composition but more important the final image and great editors are very critical about the entire package, not just the subject of an image.

This trained professional, photo editor will tell you, the human eye will always go to the lightest part of an image, in this case the white magnolia flower blob that sticks out like a sore thumb. When a glamour photograph, environmental portrait, beauty photograph, portrait, etc., is about the subject, a blob of white will only reduce the impact on that subject. This subconscious act of our minds applies to all photographs, regardless of the genre and the photographers that study their “grounds” before depressing the shutter release button know that any white in the background will usually reflect more light than their subject and will do their best to avoid this annoying distraction for photo editors. What is light, will go lighter is the general rule.

Similarly, great photographers understand that darker areas in the grounds will make their subject pop out of the image due to the natural contrast created between light and dark and the fact that dark will go darker. Some will even use the 90-Percent Rule in a more chiaroscuro method to create the illusion of depth, or a third dimension, which makes a photograph more appealing to the audience. In the end, great photographers understand absorption and reflectance, also known as the 90-Percent Rule of photography.