photo 29 May 2007 11:58 am
Lighting 102
I’ve been learning a lot about lighting lately. I’ve done almost exclusively available light shots since I started taking pictures. I bought a decent flash a while ago to take better derby pictures. Eventually I stumbled across a great flickr group that dealt exclusively with lighting. Not just any lighting, though. They dealt with strobes: cheap flashes, not the big zillion dollar rigs that you see on model shoots.
Strobist has an accompanying blog that talks about all sorts of lighting related topics. They have a course of sorts, called lighting 101 that is great a full of wonderful information.
Well, now they’re doing lighting 102.
On June 4th, just over one month from now, we will be starting from scratch, so anyone can participate. There is no fee for the program, and you are certainly free to come and go as you please.
What should you expect?
• An organic and comprehensive way of understanding and controlling light.• An enhanced creative process, by comparing your results with those of photographers from all around the world.
• The knowledge that good lighting need not be expensive.
There will be plenty of discussion, both here and on the Flickr threads, about the various topics we will be covering. We’ll be learning new techniques, talking about them and applying them in regular group assignments.
I want to make this as interactive as possible. I also want to get full value out of the wide range of perspectives, experience and ability of the readers of this site. This will allow us to do things that no physical classroom environment could accomplish.
We will be starting off at a basic level, but I hope the more advanced among you will not be put off by that. Over the last few months I have been developing what I think is a novel approach to understanding lighting and I want to use that as a foundation. Which means stating from scratch.
It starts June 4th, and you can read more about it on the strobist blog.
One of the things I’ve learned and applied from strobist is the use of gels on lights. Some of my old derby pics have decent color on the girls in the foreground, but the backgrounds are yellow (if not totally dark). This is because my flash puts out “white” light at a color temp of about 5500K. The interior of Fast Forward is lit by incandescent bulbs, which have a lower temperature, around 2800-3500K. By putting an orange gel over my flash, the color of the flash matches the color of the lights so the lighting is more even. Using lenses with a larger aperture has helped a lot as well. Compare these older derby photos of mine to these to the ones I took this past weekend. My technique has improved a lot. One thing that I used to have a lot of trouble with was skin tones, which was a result of correcting the images out of the camera in ways that killed the skin colors. Now my images out of the camera are a lot better and the skin looks much more natural.