There are few things you can use to produce impact in your image making exploits that are more powerful than the concept of contrast.  Contrast is such a naturally provocative element that it can produce strong results in a wide variety of ways via many different photographic genres.  I’ll focus here on nature photography, but it should be a simple matter to see how you can apply the approach to numerous other areas.

Let’s take a look at a few examples to help illustrate the point.

Luminosity Contrast

One particularly useful way to use contrast is in the most photographically elementary way:  light.  By focusing on contrasts in luminosity and applying your exposure settings and compositional choices accordingly, you can create some pretty dramatic results where they otherwise wouldn’t exist.

For instance, in the image accompanying this subtopic, I slightly underexposed the scene so that the backlit leaves would be…