It's time for another in the series of "Laws of Light."
Today, we're gonna look at the cylinder, the transitional object.
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But now, let's get back to the cylinder.
There's an important reason we've gotta talk about the cylinder today because the cylinder
is a transitional object and it's really important that we understand that.
Today, we're going to light a cylinder.
We've talked about a sphere.
We've talked about a cube and if you haven't seen those, you better go back and look at
those because this is a building process and you're not gonna understand this one at all.
So, let's now move forward with our cylinder.
A cylinder is a combination between a sphere and a cube, obviously.
We've got a round surface.
This round surface gives us all the qualities that the sphere had.
We have a highlight side, an incident highlight, we have a core, we have a shadow, we have
a cast shadow.
We have all five of those things happening on our cylinder.
The way to control the light on this is two-fold.
Our light can go around, which gives us more or less highlight or we can go up or down
to create a darker or lighter surface on the top.
When you have a subject that is this tall, the second issue that is created is our cast
shadow.
Now, the cast shadow, as we get the light higher and higher, becomes shorter and shorter,
which can be good or bad but in doing that, it makes the top of our subject brighter and
brighter.
So if I want a short cast shadow and I'm getting too much light on the top of my cylinder,
a lot of times I'll come in with something small, a piece of diffusion or something,
and just try to hit the top of the cylinder to take that down just a little bit.
But, if you can live with that long shadow, then raising it up and down is the easiest
way to control the light on the top here.
The cylinder lives in the same world as the sphere when it comes to separation.
We've got our light on in the background that creates our separation.
We can bring a fill card in to fill it from the side.
We can diminish that.
Even if I get this fill card in as far as I want, I still see a little bit of that core
there.
There's just a tiny bit of it.
It's pretty hard to get rid of it completely.
So let's take a look at some images that illustrate cylinders.
Well, there's our cylinder, the transitional object.
I call it the transitional object because it is now making us transition from simply
lighting a single object, a single square, a single sphere, to having to combine surfaces.
We're combining surfaces and that makes us have to consider our light in a much different
way.
If you understand how to combine surfaces, it allows you now to shoot a sphere, a face,
and a square,a car, and light both of those at the same time.
I'm understanding both of these objects at the same time.
I'm lighting for both of them at the same time.
I'm not just lighting for one or the other.
You need to understand transitional objects and how they relate to actual objects in life
because very few things in life are a sphere or a square.
Sure, you may shoot a box of cereal, you may shoot a round ball but the reality is most
of the time, we're all shooting and lighting combinations of surfaces and objects.
Our next lesson is gonna move us one step further.
We're now going to combine several objects together, a ball, cube, and a cylinder and
we're going to light them and separate them from one another.
It's going to make it more difficult but it's going to relate more to life.
So check it out on the next lesson.
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