mara solano has been shooting for nineteen years. she started on a borrowed canon ae-1 at seventeen, moved through a brief and forgettable phase with medium format digital, and eventually landed back on 35mm film for most of her personal work. she shoots editorial, some portraiture, and what she calls "slow documentary" ... long-term projects that unfold over years, not days. she is not famous in the way photographers get famous now. no viral reels, no massive following. but the people who know her work tend to stop mid-scroll when they see it. we sat down to talk about the one thing she says every photographer learns too late.
everyone talks about light, but it feels like a cliché at this point. what do you actually mean when you say light is the only thing that matters?
i mean it literally. strip everything else away ... the subject, the lens, the camera body, even the composition ... and if the light is right, something in the image will still pull you in. but reverse that. perfect composition, beautiful subject, and flat, dead light? the photo is dead. you can feel it. it has no temperature, no direction, no story.
the cliché exists because it's true and people keep saying it and nobody actually changes how they work. they nod and then they go out at 2pm on a tuesday and wonder why their photos look like documentation instead of art. light is not a setting you adjust. it's a phenomenon you have to show up for. that reframe changed everything for me around year four or five. i stopped planning shoots and started planning around light windows.
what does a light window mean to you, practically? how does that change your schedule?
it means i know, roughly, where the sun is going to be and what quality it's going to have, and i build everything else around that two to four hour block. golden hour is the obvious one ... that window sixty to ninety minutes after sunrise or before sunset. the light is low, warm, directional. it wraps. shadows go long and soft. everything looks like it has weight.
but honestly my favorite light is about twenty minutes before golden hour starts. the sky isn't fully engaged yet. the light is still cool, slightly diffused, and it does this thing where it almost outlines subjects rather than floods them. i can get a completely different emotional register in that window than i can at peak golden hour. and then there's overcast light ... which most people treat like a failure condition. i treat it like a studio softbox the size of the sky. no shadows fighting your subject. beautiful for faces. i've shot entire projects in flat grey light on purpose.
how do you train yourself to actually see light differently? because most people look at a scene and see the subject, not the light hitting the subject.
you have to reverse your eyes, which sounds ridiculous but that's the only way i can describe it. instead of looking at the person or the object, look at the surfaces. where are the highlights landing? where is the shadow edge? what direction is the light coming from and what is it bouncing off of?
that last one matters more than people realize. i was shooting a portrait once near a building with a red brick wall off to the left. the main light was beautiful. and then i looked at the shadows on my subject's face and there was this faint red cast on the shadow side because the light was bouncing off the brick. it was subtle enough that most people would edit it out as a white balance error. i left it. it made the image feel specific to that place. but i only caught it because i was watching what the light was doing, not what the subject was doing.
the exercise i give people is this: sit in a room for an hour and just watch how the light moves. don't shoot. watch. see how it changes the feeling of the same objects every fifteen minutes. do that once a week for a month and your eye will not be the same.
let's talk about harsh light. noon sun, hard shadows, the stuff photographers typically avoid. do you ever use it deliberately?
all the time. harsh light is not bad light. it's just specific light. it creates graphic shadows, high contrast, a kind of heat and aggression that softer light cannot replicate. if you're shooting something that should feel uncomfortable ... a documentary moment, a portrait that's supposed to feel exposed and raw ... harsh midday sun is honest. it doesn't flatter. sometimes that's exactly right.
the mistake people make with harsh light is fighting it. they try to use a reflector to fill in every shadow, they move the subject to shade, they underexpose trying to control the highlights. and they end up with a photo that looks like they were ashamed of the light they had. lean in instead. find the angle where the shadow is doing something compositionally. let the contrast be the point. you might shoot fifty frames that don't work and one that's genuinely powerful. that ratio is worth it.
film versus digital for learning light ... does it actually matter which one you're on?
it matters more than people want to hear. with digital you can shoot two hundred frames, look at your histogram after every three, and make micro-adjustments until you nail the exposure. you're technically learning, but you're learning through correction. with film you have thirty-six frames, you cannot see what you got, and every decision has a cost. that forces a different quality of attention.
when i went back to shooting 35mm seriously around year eight, my relationship with light changed. i started reading a scene before i lifted the camera. i'd stand there for five, ten minutes just looking. because i was not going to waste a frame on a guess. that patience is what built my eye more than any technical knowledge i've ever acquired. i'm not saying everyone needs to shoot film. i'm saying the constraint is the point. you can apply that constraint on digital by limiting yourself to thirty-six shots per outing and not reviewing them until you're home.
what's one light situation that still humbles you? something you haven't fully figured out?
window light in low-ceiling interiors. specifically late afternoon sun coming through a single window into a room where the ceiling is maybe eight feet, painted some off-white color, and there's furniture that's bouncing color everywhere. the light should be beautiful, in theory. but the bounce relationships get complicated fast. you'll meter for the window side of the face and blow out the highlights. you'll expose for the highlights and lose everything in shadow. and the color casts from the ceiling, the walls, the furniture ... they layer on each other in ways that feel impossible to balance.
i've made some of my favorite images in exactly that situation and also some of my worst. i don't have a formula. i walk around, i hold my hand up and watch how the light hits it from different positions, i take a test frame and look at it on a large screen later, and i try to be humble about the fact that i do not fully control what happens. sometimes the chaos of that light produces something i could not have planned. that's still photography to me.
last question. someone is six months in, frustrated that their photos don't look the way they feel. what do you tell them?
stop shooting at the wrong time and blame the wrong things. i know that sounds harsh but it's the most loving thing i can say. most beginners are out there at 2pm with a camera and a subject and they're frustrated that the photo feels flat. it is flat. the light is flat. that's not a skill problem, it's a timing problem.
wake up early. shoot the hour after sunrise. then put the camera down. go back out two hours before sunset. shoot that window. do that for thirty days and do not touch your editing software. your photos will change so much you will think you bought a better camera. and then, after thirty days, add composition and moment and all the other things into the mix. but build the light habit first. everything else rests on it.