Probably the one thing that fascinates me most about photography is the way light makes or breaks an image. Here are three pictures taken on different days this week. I took the first photo, which I posted yesterday, a few days ago when the light of a bright, sunny day made me notice this little corner of my world in a new way.

I took the second yesterday, when the sun was in a different place in the sky. I kind of like the contrast provided by that strip of bright green, but the image has no overall coherence.

And then the third picture is one I took today, when the sun is filtered by cloud cover and a thin, misty drizzle of rain. Blah, blah, blah.

Without the contrast provided by hard light and deep, well-defined shadows (as in the first photo), you don’t particularly notice some features at all (the pipe things sticking out from the wall), while other features (the grass, the cage) become flat and uninteresting.