All about Light
Chapter 1: How to Learn Lighting
Nothing is set in stone for how lighting should be. In this article, the authors write about different tools that can be used when it comes to lighting. You don’t have to replicate everything they show, but understanding these basic things will help you be more creative with your lighting. Lighting is how information is conveyed through a photograph. The three principles that the authors will dive deeper into are the size of the light, the three types of reflections light can cause, and the family of angles of the light. These principles have never changed and never will. Once you know and understand them, they are a guide to better photographs and more creative thinking. A photographer doesn’t need a super nice camera or super nice lighting equipment to create a good photograph. If you are creative with what you have, and understand the basics, you can create great work.
Chapter 2: Light: The Raw Material of Photography
All photography is made from a light source, and how we manipulate it. There are a lot of different terms to learn when learning about light and how it effects photography. First what you need to understand is what light is and how it creates color. Light is energy that has a electromagnetic field that fluctuates from positive to negative. The speed of the flucuation is what determines the color. Red light has less energy than blue light, therefore the energy fluctuates slower. The light that we are able to see is only a section of the electromagnetic spectrum. Light determines everything about a photograph, from the brightness, color and the contrast. There are high contrast and low contrast light sources. High contrast light sources usually come from a small single source, and creates a hard shadow. Low contrast light sources are usually a bigger light that hits the subject at different angles, causing the shadow to be more soft/blurred, since some of the light is illuminating the shadow. The light we see in photographs is more than just light, it is the lighting relationship between the light and the subject. The subject can effect the lighting by transmission, absorption, and reflection. Transmission is when light passes through an object. A simple transmission cannot be seen since it does not alter light in someway. Usually tranmission is accompanied by refration. Transmission can be direct or diffused. Direct transmission is when the light has a predictable path, and diffused is when it softens or diffuses the light. Light can also be absorbed, which can create heat and not be photographed. Then there is reflection, which we all know about since we experience it every day of our lives.
Chapter 3: The Management of Reflection and the Family of Angles
We can take three objects that are not transmissible, all different materials but all the same color. They can look different in the same lighting because of the way they reflect the light. There are a few types of reflections. There are diffuse reflections which will reflect the same brightness no matter what angle you view it. This is like a white card or piece of paper. Where ever you look at it, you can see how white the paper is, no matter what angle you are seeing it from. This type of reflection gets brighter the closer the light source is, and less bright the farther away it is. There is an equation called the inverse square law, which helps you determine how bright the reflection will be. Direct reflection is the next type of reflection. This is a mirror image of the light source. For this reflection, you must be at the same angle at which the light source hits the object. If you are not at the same angle, you will see no light in the object. The area where you are able to see the light reflecting is called the family of angles. This is important for photographers because it helps them determine where to place their lighting. There is also a type of direct reflection called polarized direct reflection. This is a direct reflection, except it is half as bright as the normal direct reflection. There are ways that photographers can do this on purpose with lighting, and they can also use polarizing filters.
