Hi, it's Jay P. Morgan.
Today we're going to talk about how to light the inside of a square, not the outside, but
the inside.
Architectural photography.
You're gonna want to see this.
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Now get back to the lesson.
Hi, it's Jay P. Morgan, and today on The Slanted Lens it's time for another Laws of Light episode.
We're gonna talk about lighting a square, not a square like we did in the first, but
the inside of a square or a room.
How to light a room.
Why are we doing this?
Because a square, a cube, and a cylinder relate to every single object in the world.
And so today we're gonna talk about a square, how it relates to the inside of a room.
In a room, we see five sides.
When you shoot a square, generally speaking, you can only see three.
Sometimes if it's small enough you might be able to see four, but generally speaking,
you can only see three or maybe four.
A room, you can see up to five.
You don't see all six, unless you're doing a 360, but we're not.
So for architecture photography, we're gonna talk about how to light the inside of that
room, and how to separate each of the walls, ceiling, and floor, so they have interest.
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that are going to involve architecture photography, including furniture.
But today we're just going to talk about how to light the room.
So most rooms have a window.
We're going to have to deal with the window, either to tape something on it, or to use
it as a key light.
If I'm gonna set my camera angle here, and I'm gonna have the window at my back, and
I've got a light here just to demonstrate this because it's just easier to use a light
to demonstrate this principle.
This is the most flat, uninteresting place for a light to be put.
You can see some dimension in the room.
You see some lines in the room.
But the walls, like on the left, do not separate that well.
It's interesting if I simply take my camera and move it off from axis here, the more I
move, the darker the walls become on the left side.
My incident angle has changed, and so now I'm getting a little darker wall on my left,
and I'm still getting that same bright wall on the right.
And we get a much nicer separation between the two of them.
Now we've got a white ceiling here, which really helps us all the way around because
it's separation by color.
You've got the tan and the beige on the walls, you've got the white ceiling, gives you that
separation.
Now if we move that light closer to that side wall, it's going to make that wall a little
darker in the corner.
And it even flares out a little bit, kind of gradually radiates into the edge of the
light, and you get a much more dramatic look at the room.
So there's the light up.
Now as we bring that light all the way down to the floor, you see that highlight, kind
of, walk across the wall.
And our floor becomes brighter and more flat.
The dimension between the wall and the ceiling becomes a lot darker.
So, where you place your light in the room is going to have a strong effect on how the
room develops those different dimensions on each of the walls.
So we've got to get it off from the camera axis, more to the side, just like you do with
a portrait.
But this can be now very deep into the image.
Doesn't have to be in this 45-degree area.
It can be a long ways away from the camera to light the walls and be able to give you
that dimension.
So, we're going to go downstairs now.
We're going to light the kitchen down there on those different room or different walls.
We're going to start adding some lights and some interest, see how we can build on this
principle of brightening and darkening the room.
So upstairs we looked at trying trying to create different values for the different
walls of the room.
When we come into a room, there's a lot of other issues here because we've got a lot
of different surfaces.
But, again, we've got consider the light in the room.
The first thing I do when I shoot an architectural piece is I look at the light that is in the
room, the natural light.
I've got a window at the end here that's gonna be bright, I know that, something I'm just
going to have to deal with.
I've got big double doors behind me here that's going to throw a lot of flat light in.
And I have nothing coming down the stairs because there's no light source up there.
So I'm going to have to pick an angle.
If I set myself in the middle of this room, that's the most flat I can get, because I've
got light source right behind me, and then a small light source up there, which are both
creating kind of a back light here.
So I'm gonna want to push to one side or another for a couple of reasons.
One is, I want the room to have some dimension.
I don't want this Wes Anderson look.
It's too boxy, and it makes the room actually seem small because you get this, kind of,
small, wide angle flat wall at the back.
Because of the steps on the camera right side, it's going to give us a little more dimension,
and the light seems to be favoring that side, so we're gonna push to camera left here.
We're just gonna come around, and that already gives us more dimension in the room by just
simply placing the camera in the right place.
My light sources are off.
I have two light sources on my camera right side.
They're coming in from the camera right side, and now that's going to let the wall that's
on the camera right side, because the light's kind of clipping that wall, become a little
darker.
And it's going to make this wall on the camera left side a little brighter.
And then we're going to have a nice dimension on that wall on the back.
That's just placing the camera, first principle.
First thing we do, placing the camera.
I don't worry too much about squaring the camera anymore because I do all of that in
Photoshop.
I mean, I get it as square as I can, but I don't let that make me put the camera at this
height.
That's the next decision I have to make.
Do I want my camera to be up, so I'm looking down?
Maybe I want to feature the hardwood floors.
Or do I want my camera to be down because it's a lofted ceiling and it goes up two stories?
Well, in this case, we've got a, you know, not a low ceiling by any means, but it's not
a beautiful feature of the room.
The floors are more the feature of the room, so I would concentrate on looking more down
towards the floor and some of those leading lines of the floors and into the cabinets.
So there you have it.
How to light the interior of a square or a room.
There are three principles that I want you to remember as you walk away from this lesson.
Number 1 is make sure you don't put the window, which is the light source of the room and
the main light a lot of times, directly behind you.
Get that light source off to camera right or camera left, so it starts to create dimension
in the room.
Number 2, if you're going to add a light to the room, whether it's high or low, it's going
to create either a brighter ceiling or a brighter floor.
Number 3, the height of the camera can either feature the top or the bottom of the square,
or the ceiling, vaulted ceilings, or the carpet or hardwood on the floor.
So, you make a decision when you set the height of the camera on whether you want to emphasize
the bottom or the top.
So those are the first three principles we talked about with architecture photography.
There's more to come when we add furniture and can lights, and all the other things that
make it very, very interesting, in our next lesson.
So keep those camera's rolling, and keep on clicking.
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Please let me out.
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