Fresnel

For my first picture, I picked one I have taken myself at 320 in the afternoon a patch of woods near felthorpe in November 2010.

It shows the sun coming through the trees pushing its light threw the branches and onto the canopy, then on to the ground; the snow is absorbing and reflecting light in different areas. Most things that we see (people, cars, houses, animals, trees, etc.) do not themselves emit visible light but reflect incident natural sunlight and artificial light.

The trees on the left are more spread out allowing a brighter light to penetrate through the foliage and onto the ground below creating intense light in patches on areas of snow. You would get the effect of what they call snow blindness creating a brilliant bright light, so snow is highly reflective made up of thousands if not millions of pieces of ice, which absorb and scatter light creating a mist like effect in and among the trees.

The bark on the trees is highly absorbent hardly any reflectivity at all. However, in the real world, most objects have convoluted surfaces, rough, porous, that exhibits a diffuse reflection, with the incident light being reflected in all directions. Because of its dull colour making it look black with no detail the further from the foreground you go deeper into the picture the lighter the colour becomes this is because of the snow scattering light particles and reflecting them back into the air and onto the foliage above creating an almost translucent effect.

To the right of the picture, the foliage at the bottom is denser allowing much less light through creating star burst effect at the tops of the trees. Even though this side has direct sunlight at the top allowing lighter particles to dance through the trees reflecting back onto the green foliage and through the trees again, so it's more like a double lighting effect.

Because hardly any light is on the snow on the right-hand side of the picture, the snow takes on its appearance created by the shadows of the trees absorbing their colors to make the snow look darker, with a more light-blue saturation with the mixture of grey, and a dull white.

So in this picture we have absorption, reflection, diffused reflection, scattering of light creating a haze with no brilliant colours, except for the white snow creating an intense light in places.

For my second picture, I am also using one I've taken myself in 2005 in Dominica Republic rainforest. The place was very green and humid; tropical. It had no direct sun light from the above canopy.  

It looks very bright and colorful. This was due to light scattering of light in the dense foliage above; leaves acting like mirrors. The mirror reflects all the components of white light (such as red, green, and blue wavelengths) almost equally and the reflected specular light. 

This image is referred to as "virtual" because it does not actually exist (does not produce light) and appears to be behind the plane of the mirror due to an assumption that the brain naturally makes.

The ground below scatters the light particles off the shiny surface of the leaves making its own source.   

Drawing it’s natural light and colors, from its surroundings creating the false brightness. There are far more occurrences of diffuse reflection than a specular reflection in our everyday environment. So in this picture we have absorption, reflection, diffused reflection, scattering of light creating some brilliant colours, except for the dull green of the rocks and the moss threw them absorbing all the light only reflecting back as the rainforest creates a due on the ground and in the air, creating more reflective droplets of water.

For my third picture, I created myself. It's a painting of a lady standing in water with the Moon rising behind her. I tried to incorporate all the colors in this picture to show reflectivity, colour absorption, color reflectivity, secular colour, and diffused reflection.

The amount of light reflected by an object, and how it is reflected, is highly dependent upon the smoothness or texture, of the surface. 

When the surface had imperfections like Water has a lot of ripples, the surface imperfections;  the reflection of light can be roughly categorized into two types of reflection: specular reflection is defined as light reflected from a smooth surface at a definite angle, and diffuse reflection, which is produced by rough surfaces that tend to reflect light in all directions.