Know Your Lighting

Now there's a nice rainbow! (As seen last June, from Williamstown, looking towards Mt. Greylock.) As a landscape painter and when doing nature photography, my teachers often said you’ll get a great image if the sun is at your back – in other words, when light spreads out and illuminates the landscape in front of you. This tactic works for many scenes, but of course, not for every landscape – if you did a sunset image, probably the sun is in front of you. At sunset did you turn around and look behind you to see the orange-pink glow on the world? That glow is often referred to by artists as ‘Magic Hour’ since it only occurs for a short time during dusk, and dawn. And what about rainbows, when the light must be far in front of you? Really the point of this kind of advice is this: it always helps to be aware of when, where, and what kind of lighting you are using. Know your lighting.

Some things to know about your lighting...

Color Temperature: this you already know, via our white balance exercise.

Location: Where are the Light Sources? Light can come from any direction. In art we tend to group it simply as scenes that are front lit, side lit, silhouette, rim lit, flash (direct), flash (bounced).

What kind of light: Light can also be direct, meaning from an obvious light source. Sometimes a light source is bounced from one place to another, such as beamed into a mirror and then onto your subject matter, and sometimes light is bent through a material like water. These situations are called Direct Light (common), Reflected Light (uncommon), Refracted Light (rare, like rainbows)

Today’s exercise: create a still-life scene with one direct light source, and some simple subject matter. Then take a series of ten photos of the scene where you systematically move the lighting and add reflections, thus demonstrating and experiencing each main type of lighting. Put the photos together to create one composite image wherein you can easily compare the differences of one lighting scenario to the next.
        Hints: You’ll need to set this up so that you can easily adjust the lighting. You will need a light, such as a desklamp or clip lamp. Use only that light. Turn off all other lights. You'll also need a reflector such as a mirror or piece of white posterboard or paper. To create reflections, hold or place the reflector opposite the light source and angled towards the still life... experiment to see if you can soften the shadows. It helps to put the camera on a tripod, if you have one. Use the same scene throughout, but alter the lighting for each photo. You may need to adjust the exposure to avoid blinkies and crunges. Make sure of course that you’ve set your white balance for the best result for your scene.
      Create the following directions of light: silhouette (the light is behind the subject matter, pointing towards your camera), silhouette with an additional reflected light (I used a mirror for the examples above), side lit right, side lit right w/reflection added, side lit left, side lit left + reflected light, 3/4 lit (light is in front, somewhat above and somewhat to the side), 3/4 lit + reflection, bottom lit (lit comes from below, the 'spooky campfire' look), and bottom-lit + reflected light. It's not required but if you'd like to do light from above (Top Lit), you could add it in and it's top lit + reflection version too. Be sure you note what kind of light you use, and then label each direction of light source that you use.
      Your final result should be similar in format to this image (although you might choose to use color)...