Natural Lighting
Artificial lighting
Lighting Angles
How many lights do you need?
Lighting Ratios
Photography is the art of illusion, tricking the viewer into thinking an image reproduced on a two-dimensional piece of paper or a computer screen is natural and three-dimensional. The third dimension in a photograph is created by the contrast between light and shadow.
If a subject is illuminated with the light at or near the camera lens there will be virtually no shadows and the resulting image will look flat. Moving the light source away from the camera lens position will create shadows and the illusion of depth. But because the range of brightness film or a digital camera can record is limited, the detail in the shadow areas will be lost unless some method of “fill” light is used. Fill light can be provided two ways: 1) a reflector which redirects the single light source into the dark shadows, or 2) a second light source.
