Author: David Hobby

In Lighting 102, we have learned some of the basic physical controls that we can apply to light: angle, distance, size, restriction.

We’ve also learned how to identify and control the zones of light that fall onto our subjects: diffused highlight, specular highlight, diffused shadow, diffused highlight to shadow transfer.

But there is another control lever that is more complex, more powerful and more evocative than all of the ones listed above. Read more »

Restricting light is a powerful control. By taking light away, we can evoke character or drama or mystery or any number of other things. My friend Joe McNally goes as far as to distill it down to this:Read more »

Let’s jump off this train for a minute and think about our different lighting controls in context with each other. More specifically, let’s look at size and distance.Read more »

We have all had to deal with specular highlights, even if we did not know what they were called.

Think about portraits of people you have made in direct sunlight. Remember that glaring spot on their face or forehead? That was the specular highlight of the sun. And if the person was sweating or had oily skin it only made matters worse, as that sheen is very efficient at throwing back a hard specular.

That reflection is a function of the intensity of the light source. More specifically, think of it as intensity per square inch. And understanding this starts to tell us how to control it.Read more »

Photo by Kenneth Lau

When you light any three-dimensional object, you create four zones of light. It doesn’t matter if it is a face or a tomato. So today let’s learn from this tomato, photographed by Strobist reader Kenneth Lau.Read more »

So what is it that actually makes a light soft? And why is it a function of both size and distance?

In the portrait above, Dean is being bathed in soft umbrella light from camera right. But let’s zoom in a little closer and place some waypoints on his forehead…Read more »

This is Gary. Gary is a snail. And he’s beautifully lit by my friend Sara Lando. While babysitting Gary for a friend, Sara decided to actually build a miniature set and then photograph the snail in the style of Irving Penn. Because this is what creative people do in their spare time.

And pray tell, what beautifully soft light source is she using to subtly caress Gary and reveal his form?

Oh look, it’s a bare speedlight:Read more »

By using a second light to ensure legibility in the shadows, we can place a “floor” on how low the tones will go on our subject. But we can also combine this with the fast falloff of a closely placed key light to get total control of a subject with an inherently tough dynamic range.Read more »

Just like your focus, light has depth of field.

For this layer of control, we are going to look at two different pictures. Everything will be the same except for one thing: The distance from our light to our subject will change. Nothing else. In particular, the subject-to-background distance will not change.

Exhibit number one is a dark portrait of Dean, situated a few feet in front of a white wall, pictured above.

White wall? Yes, white. But it doesn’t look white, does it?Read more »

The legibility from our fill light doesn’t call attention to itself. It just makes your other light look that much better. It introduces a balance; a range; a relationship between the two lights.

Think of it like a backup band behind a soloist: the band is there to fill in the gaps, add background and make the soloist sound even better. Fill light is the music machine to your drunken karaoke key light.

So just like we did in Lighting 101, lets take a walk around the block and explore some lighting angles. For consistency, we are going to keep the same key light source for every photo on this page. So it is just about the lighting angles — i.e., no other variables.Read more »