BeyondPhotoShoot

Hey folks,Thank you for your patience as we worked to fold the newly revised Lighting 102 module into the site, with all of the requisite cross-linking, etc. I know this probably resulted in a flurry of emails and RSS notifications to the site’s subscr…

Category: Wedding Photographer: Drew Gregory I really like what Photofocus photographer of the day, Drew Gregory, has shared here. He’s taken the traditional wedding kiss shot and given it a new top-down angle view while evoking great passion between the two lovers. The reflection in the window and dark contrast of the stairs only adds to the quality…

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 »