A recent photo of mine relied on interesting light for much of its appeal. Not so much the lovely color, directionality or softness of the light, but that the light source itself was in the photo.

This breaks one of the basic "rules" that amateurs rely on to get good shots of their subjects, but I just happen to be fascinated by the look when the light source is in the photo.

Or appears to be. In this case I needed to add some lighting.

You can see that the light on his face comes from the left side of the frame. To put it there I swiveled the head of my strobe 90° to the left and bounced its light off the wall. To keep any light from the flash showing up on the portion of the wall that's visible I added a little black cardboard box to my strobe's head to act as "barn doors" to restrict the strobe's beam to a spot just outside the frame.

Below are some other examples with the light source in the picture.

It was just luck that I got someone's flash going off in the picture of Gregoire campaigning. I was already using my own lighting (bouncing a warm-gelled flash off the ceiling), but that person's direct flash was so much stronger (and bluer), I was able to darken the whole picture so that my bounced flash looked like a trace of ambient light.

At this daytime horse competition in an indoor arena I saw the potential of a silhouette when horse and rider enter. Here the light source is all of the bright outside (not the sun or sky per se) and part of it is in the photo. I spent a half hour working in Photoshop to bring out all the rim lighting on the subject.

The main hill of this cyclocross event had the sun at the top. I love the look, and even the lens flare. Many of my frames were useless because of excessive flare or exposure problems, so I was lucky that lots of riders came along over the afternoon.

This memorial service in Iraq was in a large hall with bland lighting, but there was one door open. I spent most of the service shooting angles looking toward the door, struggling with exposure difficulties and flare.

I love how the saluting soldier outside is mostly washed out. And lens flare brightens the edge of things around the door. Since flare is an artifact of the camera and lens, I have the option of using Photoshop to minimize it, but in this case I like it.

Including the rising sun in the shot of a stakeout surrounding a village in Iraq didn't just look good, it was relevant to the story. Again, lots of Photoshop work.

Lighting is almost everything in this shot of soldiers sitting in a bunker illuminated by two glow sticks. Note how I shot from back far enough to have a frame of dark soldiers in the foreground.

It wasn't necessary to shoot toward the light-- I could have put my tripod near the glow sticks and shot entirely with the light instead of against it. The soldiers would have been more fully illuminated, but it sure wouldn't have looked as good.

Here most of the Photoshop work was fighting the huge "noise" (what we called grain in the old days) from my early version of a digital camera (a Nikon D1H).

Finally, here's the rare example of where one doesn't have a choice but to shoot toward the light source. And it required almost no Photoshop work.