Lighting is a difficult thing to get right without the proper equipment. Even the amateur photographer will be familiar with the annoyances of on-camera flash; washed-out images and a lack of control over the quality or direction of the light is enough to destroy the best-composed image.
To get around that in a professional portrait environment, the experts use ‘studio lighting’. Studio lighting can be broken down into two categories, continuous lighting and flash. Continuous lighting has two main advantages, and there are many disadvantages to its use.
The good points of continuous light:
- It’s inexpensive, and makes a good starting point for anyone on a small budget.
- You can see what the light is doing and where the shadows and highlights are.
The main disadvantages of continuous light:
- It generally produces more heat than light, very uncomfortable!
- The light that it produces is not balanced to daylight.
OK, so what does this mean in practical terms? The heat produced by continuous light in a studio can make both you and your subject uncomfortable. Also, because of the very bright light, it will also have the effect of closing down the iris in your model’s eyes, which it is generally accepted, doesn’t make a good portrait. The photos below show the effect of continuous lighting on the eyes.
Every photographer has taken photos in artificial light and ended up with yellow pictures. To your eyes, the light from a tungsten bulb looks white, but it isn’t. Colour temperature (the colour of the light) is measured in degrees Kelvin, daylight is around 5,600K and a tungsten bulb is more like 3,200K and therefore records on daylight balanced film as yellow.
This can be overcome in three ways: Firstly, you can use tungsten balanced colour film. Secondly, you can put a filter on your lens, which will enable you to use any daylight film. The big problem with these two solutions is that as the tungsten filament in the bulb burns it leaves a small residue on the inside of the glass envelope. This means that the colour of the light gradually becomes more yellow as the bulb ages.
This brings us to the third way to overcome lighting issues: flash.
With a normal on-camera flash there is no way of knowing what the lighting effect will be, other than it will be predictably unpredictable.
Modeling Lamp
In the professional studio, flash units are fitted with a continuous lamp, which can be seen on the photograph below sitting in the centre of the circular flash tube. Because of its position it gives a very accurate indication of the angle and quality that the flash will produce when fired. This makes your lighting easy to set-up, because’what-you-see-is-what-you-get.
As this lamp is relatively low powered you don’t get the heat or brightness problem we talked about with continuous light. The only thing to remember is that the flash will be a much stronger light, so the shadows will be darker and the highlights will be lighter. To trick your eye/brain built-in compensation device when setting up lighting, first close one eye (a camera only has one) then squint through your lashes.
The key to successful studio lighting is, of course, experimentation (no two subjects will ever be the same). There are many ways in which you can light a subject – the options are countless. Once you have acquired some more light sources you can begin to experiment with multiple-bulb lighting, which can produce even more complex, interesting effects.
Experimentation is the key!
SOURCE: Wikipedia | WarehouseExpress.com
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