Digital Photography (WK2) - Design

Hey everyone! We've gone over SO MUCH regarding design this week, but I was most excited to learn about lighting in photography - how to use it, when to change it, what type to use for different effects - and we learned A LOT about that yesterday when we had a guest speaker. 

Artificial lighting has always been a struggle for me, which I believe is why I tend to shoot outdoors (plus, nature is beautiful and it's easy to find something worth photographing). During yesterday's class, I learned how to create and manipulate shadows, while also finding the best type of lighting for a specific model. I found the Inverse Square Law to be really interesting because I didn't realize it had a name. The Inverse Square Law states that the intensity of light decreases proportionally to the square of the distance from the light source. In simpler terms, light gets dimmer as it travels further from the source. The further the light is from your subject, the more the light spreads out, resulting in less intensity on the subject. Typing this out, it's pretty obvious that closer light = harsher contrast/shadows, and further light = more even shadows and softer light, but it became pretty clear that my confusion wasn't HOW the lights work, but rather that I was using the wrong lighting entirely! The lights I have are definitely too harsh, and I haven't used anything to diffuse them - but now I know for the future if I ever want to attempt portrait/studio photography again.

I also learned that different types of lighting are best for different models. For example, you wouldn't use harsh side lighting on an elderly person with wrinkles because it would highlight every ridge on their skin. It would be much more flattering to use soft, diffused light like a softbox or natural window lighting. So in an environment with multiple models, no lighting setup is going to be exactly perfect for each individual. 

I hope you learned something too! Until next time!