lecture:
Lighting: basics
A couple of old "chestnuts" that have been around since about the beginning of photographic times still hold true today.
"Get it on the negative," and "Expose for the shadows and print for the highlights."
Creating good black and white negatives means ensuring that you have sufficient information in the shadow areas and then making the print so there is detail in the brightest highlight.
Light's Aspects
Light has three main characteristics--color, intensity, and quality. For purposes of this discussion, we can throw out color. Intensity is pretty simple--you just meter it. I've used an incident meter for both flash and natural light pretty much since the beginning, so I'm sold on that method.
Quality is a whole different story. I like to call it the "shape" of the light. It means whether the light is hard or soft. It's relative to the size of the light source in relation to the subject and the shape of the light or light modifier, e.g., soft box or umbrella.
Light has three main characteristics--color, intensity, and quality. For purposes of this discussion, we can throw out color. Intensity is pretty simple--you just meter it. I've used an incident meter for both flash and natural light pretty much since the beginning, so I'm sold on that method.
Quality is a whole different story. I like to call it the "shape" of the light. It means whether the light is hard or soft. It's relative to the size of the light source in relation to the subject and the shape of the light or light modifier, e.g., soft box or umbrella.
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Hard And Soft Light
Another factor to consider when you are determining how "hard" or "soft" you want the light is diffusion. As a general rule of thumb, increase the diffusion when you increase the harshness of the light. Parabolic and pan reflectors will give you a very hard edged light with a well-defined edge shadow from highlight to shadow. Umbrellas and soft boxes are softer and the edge shadow is less defined, creating a "wraparound" look to the lighting.
AAnother factor to consider when you are determining how "hard" or "soft" you want the light is diffusion. As a general rule of thumb, increase the diffusion when you increase the harshness of the light. Parabolic and pan reflectors will give you a very hard edged light with a well-defined edge shadow from highlight to shadow. Umbrellas and soft boxes are softer and the edge shadow is less defined, creating a "wraparound" look to the lighting.
gain, it depends upon the effect you're after. I'm not big on hard and fast rules. The same applies to natural light, one of my favorite options. Even though the sun is a pretty large light source, being 93 million miles away makes it a relatively small hard light. Use it directly and it's hard as nails. Bounce it off an open sky and that becomes your light source, much bigger and much softer.
For the purposes of this tutorial, you will be using the backdrops in class, white seamless background paper and a four light setup.
- You need two lights to illuminate your background. Place them approximately 2-3 ft away from the background and aim them at 45-degree angles toward the background, as shown in the diagram.
- Place your key light, which is the light providing the overall lighting on your subject, to one side of your subject, approximately 5 ft away, also at a 45 degree angle to them.
- Place the fill light opposite the key light, at the same distance away from the subject and at the same angle.
- In order to achieve a truly blown, white background, you should set your background lights at least one f-stop over your subject lighting. For example, I prefer to photograph my subjects at f/11; therefore, I set my background lighting at f/16. In larger spaces where your subject can be further away from the background, you can go 2 or even 3 stops over your subject lighting. In smaller spaces there is always the danger of strobe flare degrading the edges of your subject. There are ways around this problem, such as gobos etc, but these are often hard to use in a smaller space.
- For a three light setup, you will still use two lights for the background, but you will not use a fill light on your subject. The modifier for the key light should be as large as possible and positioned closer to the front of the subject.
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