In this episode, I'll show you how the
position of light dramatically changes
the look of your photos!
Hi everybody welcome to another episode
of Exploring Photography right here on
adoramatv I'm Mark Wallace,
joined once again by Katy,
and we are going to be continuing our
mini-series on the qualities of light,
and how to control off-camera flash in a
small studio. Last week we talked about
the effective size of light, so if you
haven't seen that, make sure you check
that out, and in this episode we really
want to look at the position of light in
relationship to our camera. Now let me
give you a quick example of why this is
important. So Katy, if you'll just zip over
here. We're going to take a really simple
portrait. Look right at me.
Perfect, and you know that looks pretty
good, but if she stays exactly where she
is and I move just a little bit, and take
another shot, huh... it looks like Nosferatu!
We do not want that! Why is that? Well
this one is pretty obvious, but it might
not be as obvious when you start adding
a bunch of light, and so to explain all
of this stuff, I'm going to show you this
little animation. When we talk about the
position of our light, it's always in
relationship to the position of our
camera. In this diagram the camera is
directly in front of our model, if we add
a light behind the camera, it's called
front light, because the light is hitting
the front of our model, just like our
camera. Both the camera and the light are
in front of the model. We can change the
direction of our light by moving it in
relationship to our camera. This is
called side light, because the light has
moved to the side of our model in
relationship to our camera. In this
scenario, the light is now 90 degrees
away from our camera. When we move our
light behind our model, we create what is
known as backlight, because the light is
behind our model in relationship to our
camera. We can also change the direction
of our light by moving the position of
our camera. In this setup we can move our
camera closer to our light,and the light
that was back light, becomes side light
because the position of our light in
relationship to our camera has changed
from 180 degrees to 90 degrees.
If we continue moving our
camera closer to the light, the side
light becomes front light, because the
position of the light in relationship to
the camera changes from 90 degrees to
zero. Contrast is an important term to
understand. Contrast is the difference
between the darkest and lightest areas
in a photograph. The greater the
difference, the higher the contrast, we
can change the contrast in our images by
changing the direction of light. Let's
take a look at the position of our
lights again. In this setup, we have front
light. Front light creates very low
contrast photos, because the light is the
same on both sides of our models face.
There is no significant change from the
brightest and darkest areas. Side light
creates higher contrast photos, because
one side of our model is illuminated, and
the other side falls into darkness.
There is a significant difference in the
brightest and darkest areas of our
subject. Backlight creates maximum
contrast. The subject becomes a
silhouette, and the difference between
the brightest and darkest areas, are at
their greatest. in addition to changing
contrasts by moving our lights
horizontally around our subject, we can
move lights vertically as well. Here are
examples of lights placed, low, medium
and high in relationship to our camera .
Well that explains a lot, depending on where
our light is, in relationship to our
camera. We get really different results.
In fact, next week we're going to put all
of this together. We're going to do
effective size, the stuff we did in the
previous episode, and the position of
light, and the quality of light. We're
going to do some feathering, all of that
stuff, with Katy in a small studio to
show you how it all works! So make sure
you don't miss us next week!
Thanks again and we'll see you again next week!