WHAT IS LIGHT? 
  •  First we have to understand light. All light appears equal. It's not.  Our eyes will compensate for differences, unfortunately film and digital cameras don't. They record it as they see it and it differs from what we see.

  •  It has different characteristics of color temperature and hue.  This applies to both natural light and artificially created light.  

  •  The accomplished photographer understands his bread and butter is light, an acute awareness of the prevalent light. And his second attribute is knowing how to manipulate that light. The definition of PHOTO-graphy involves the understanding and manipulation of light. The key words here are awareness, understanding and manipulation.

  •   In the beginning all we had was our natural primary light source, the Sun. Sunlight is also referred to as natural or ambient light.  It is usually not perfect when you need it, so we have learned to create it artificially.  So man had to come up with light when there simply wasn't enough. Man came out with artificial light and all was well again....not really. With early film plates flash powder (similar to gunpowder) was the first artificial flash. Maybe it answers the question why we "shoot" pictures? Many great pictures exist from those days, many buildings don't. Especially those who used flash powder around gas-filled mines.

  •  You can't just buy lighting equipment and become a photographer overnight. You have to understand the lighting, know your equipment, and manipulate it to change the outcome of the picture. In fact, man-made light for the new photographer can be the hardest part of the learning curve because he was promised so much by the manufacturer.  Who controls the lighting in your picture, you do. 

White Light Comes In Many Colors 

When we see a color, we are simply seeing light of a particular section of the spectrum which has reflected back to you. 

In white light, an object that looks yellow, for instance, is absorbing all the other wavelengths (colors) of the white light and letting only the yellow reflect back to your eyes.

Color temperature is measured and has a name.  "Kelvin"
It is stated as Kelvin temperature. On the temperature scale, degrees Kelvin (K) degrees are always 273 degrees higher than the same temperature on the Celsius scale or Fahrenheit. Thus a white-hot piece of iron with an approximate temperature of 2000° Celsius has a color temperature of 2273 K. If you were to pick up a piece of white-hot iron you would swear its more than that. 

So we talk about light in terms of it's temperature color. (for simplicity, lets just think of these temperatures as flavors, or tones) Even to the unaided eye light can appear very white as in halogen or dull yellow as in mercury or with a green tinge as in fluorescents. When you shoot with film under varying lights you can get varying results amplified more than the unaided eye can see.  

In the corner of the mall shot above, one can see just a small selection of the light hues in this small an area. Thus what appeared as a nice shot in the viewfinder might come back totally different. 

How many times did you take pictures at your office under fluorescents that come back with green alien people. OK it was the day after the office party and some had a few too many.  The film was sensitive to the invisible green cast that fluorescents give off that your eyes merely blended in with or you did not notice. In digital use, we color balance the scene first, lowering the color differential of the green usually by red balance and we get a more normal look.

Photoshop clues - Advanced
  •  For Photoshop users.  The Hue is the actual color or wavelength reflected by an object. There are seven hues in the visible color spectrum. These seven hues are as follows: blue, green, red, cyan, magenta, yellow, and white. But our friend Hue doesn't work alone because we have to describe it further. 

  •  So we could say the color we have is Bright Green or Dull Blue. This is called The Brightness measurement. If we wish to describe a color or brightness, we can say that it is dull, or brilliant, many terms may be used here. Now if we took a little white or black and added it to the same color we would be changing The Saturation of the color. The color departs from neutral gray of the same brightness.  In other words, saturation is a measure of the alteration of the color's purity.

Color Temperatures Kelvin (K) 

Daylight                                  5000-5400 K

Quartz Halogen                      Varies

Fluorescent                             2200 K

Tungsten                                 3200 K

Sodium                                    2200 - 2700 K

Photo Lamps                           3400 K

LEDS                                        Varies

Natural Lighting
  •  The easiest light source is the Sun. But it too has it's qualities and they change during the day. Be patient, you might have to wait a while and let Mother Nature set the stage for you to create that perfect image. Generally between ten and two the sun is high and strong and unflattering.

Without cloud coverage
  •  It generates a specula overhead sharp light with dark shadows. This is not the right place for that fun in the sun shots where the Portrait is the objective. Your eyes have a greater range of contrast than film does. What looks good to your eyes will blow out on film. 

  •  This 10Am - 2Pm light will generate dark shadows. The overhead light will place those shadows in underneath the subject's eyes and nose.

Use a reflector
  •  An easy solution s the large foam core reflector in front of and under the subject at 45 degrees so light comes from the bottom softening the dark shadows. Another answer is to move the subject into the shade or create the shade with a large diffuse piece of material such as a bed sheet supported by two poles of PVC. This is not the best solution on a windy day. Wait for the light to change direction later in the afternoon or for the clouds to change. An overcast day is ideal. The light from the sun will be sufficiently diffused. Shadows will almost wash out.

Studio Lighting and Portraits:
  •  For good portraits you can do with simple natural, ambient window light (sometimes called North Light) and a simple foam core reflector.  If you hock the family car you can have an elaborate studio light setup utilizing as many as five lights. The advantage of the studio gear is once setup, a lot of work is duplication and you never worry about the Northern Light, unless you have to stash all the stuff so you can get back to your bed or living room.

  •  But basically, a studio once set up, is automatic, you flip a switch and it's the same all day or all week.  You can easily spend more on lighting equipment than you spent on your camera.  It's a good idea to plan before you plunk down the currency to find out you ordered too much or too little or the wrong thing altogether.
 

The best book for the beginner is Kodak's Guide to Portraiture
  •  An old, usually found book on portraiture easily found at most libraries.  It is an invaluable tool for the portrait novice. Why the emphasis on Portraiture? I'll bet most of the every day pictures you take have faces in them and they are fairly easy to find. Everybody has one, some people are two-faced.  

  •  I feel Portraiture is the most difficult art form with a camera for it has the most amounts of elements. The artist is the one who can differentiate the personality in the portrait or emphasize a particular personality of a person. This basic book deals in composition and positioning of lights which allows a change in the perception of the individual. 
  •  It contains many diagrams that are do-it-yourself. They include lighting diagrams to show how the shots were done, and they include samples from a variety of photographers.  It's all about technique.  

Remember: Everybody has a face
  •  Photography relating to faces is called portraiture. Photography used to prove something is called evidence.  Taking pictures to prove you are right is called saving face.  Photography used in tasteless exploitation of the human form is called pornography.  If done correctly,  it is called an art form except in certain religious circles.
 

Good use of light and good use of face
  •  To make good portraits we need good light. That's the easy part.
We also need to emphasize the good parts of a persons face. That’s a little trickier. In the light source we are concerned with; the light color or temperature; the angles of the light or lights; the ratios of one light to another.  The primary is called the Key Light; the secondary is called the Fill Light. Other names of lights may be the "Hair Light" and the "Kicker" light.  After you have absorbed all this there is Bud Light and Miller Light.

Many Faces
  •  The next step is to analyze the subject’s face to bring out the best, or the mood or the personality of the subject.   We look at the subject from three views:

  • Full-face view - Simply put, dead-on from the front, the full front shot is unbecoming. It is the one on your driver’s license, gun permit, wanted poster and hopefully not the ones the Forensic people take. Hence the term "MUG Shots".

  • Side view – Obviously this view is from the side, the best side.

  • 2/3 view - Here is the most appealing and pleasing shot to most people because you using part of the front and the side in one picture. The 2/3 or 3/4 shot 

Product Recommendation:  Controlling the Light
  •  You need light stands and umbrella adapters for studio lights. My favorite brand is Bogen/ Manfrotto and  some of their gear I have had for thirty years and looks like new. Today it's called Manfrotto distributed by Bogen. 

  •  In a studio you have a choice of going with either "strobe units" or hot lights such as halogen. These usually bigger units plug into AC outlets and are more powerful than flash units using battery power. They are mounted on light stands and may be used with reflectors and or "softboxes". The hot lights are usually found in amateur setups as they are less expensive.  Till one falls over, and then, they are found in the garage, eBay or in the for sale ads on forums.

  •  Rarely do you ever see just a bare bulb out there. Lighting modifiers are just as important as the lights themselves.  Studio lights have mounting rings (always an option) that can accept the various softboxes available on the market. Most studio lights have a provision for a reflector. In addition there are light controllers or modifiers like snoots, barn doors, and gels.

Light from the flash on camera is

   1. Harsh and direct.

   2. Can cause Red-eye

   3. Usually a little more than you need ( phrase: blown away) 

   4. Less than you need  (phrase: underexposed)  

   5. Sometimes nothing (it didn't go off, not on or didn't recycle)

   6. Not enough because you exceeded the range of the flash unit. 

We can manipulate ( there's that word again) on camera flashes with:

   1. Add- on diffusers such as Lumi-Quist and Sto-fen and Fong’s Light Sphere

   2. Using bounce technique's such as walls and ceilings

   3. Using bounce cards or a simple white piece of cardboard and a rubber band 

   4. Built in bounce and wide angle adapters from the manufacturers

Impossible to judge. 

  •  This is because you can't see the effects of a flash at the time the shutter goes off.  At thousandths of a second we don't really process in our minds eye what really happened during the burst thus most of the flashes rely on distance measuring devices for the exposure.  

  •  Some flashes pre-flash a small light to assist in checking the distance and in some low-light conditions turn on a small flashlight to help ascertain distance and focus. We teach in class how to do a simple experiment to tune your thinking to the flash in your camera. We will also introduce you to the flash card, the primary bounce teaching tool.

 

Measuring Flash - We can measure flash several ways.

  •  Flash Meters

  •  Digital photography has an advantage.  The recall and LCD, LED.  The flash meter and trial and error. You get to see what you screwed up before the gal in the lab gets to see it.  That's good,  you learn quickly from your mistakes, and it's hard to make points with your photographic prowess with the gal who looks at junk all day and realizes your true potential.

  •  In the past Polaroid film was the test bed for the serious amateur or professional to "check the lighting".   Unfortunately for the consumer a dollar per picture for a Polaroid in addition the the prints wasted makes Polaroid an expensive luxury. Film-based photography takes an hour or two these days for processing.  That's a long time if you didn't take notes and can't remember the settings. 

  •  When we tune our lighting we will take notes. Also many of the labs today, especially with the wide latitude of film, correct most mistakes before you see them. So we have to tell the lab to process and NOT correct the exposures. 

  •  We learn from our mistakes only if we can see them. Another alternative is to use slides which record many mistakes as they have a much narrower latitude than print film. We'll use slides to fine tune things.

Flash Disasters

  •  Red-eye sounds like something you got at summer camp. Actually that's Pink -eye. When the flash is too close to the lens, it tends to bounce off the rear surface of the subjects retina illuminating it and reflecting back the camera. Since there are millions of little arteries there, they reflect RED. You get nice eyeball shots that glow red and look like the devil made me do it.

  •  There are four major ways to get rid of red-eye.

   1. Brackets - Lifts the flash away from the camera and increases the angle of light.

   2. Bounce – Bouncing the light widens the path of light and diffuses it.

   3. An Ink Pen can be used to color the eyes on finished prints. 

   4. Photoshop - digitally remove red-eye. This can be fairly time consuming.
 

  •  Flashes on occasion suffer from no poop de pop.
Using flash units can be a little stymieing at times. You are all set to make the picture work and no flash. Or you get pictures back and they exhibit nothing, faint images or half the photo is black and missing.  Check the following:

   1. Poor connections

   2. Dead or almost dead batteries

   3. Confusion with daylight numbers

   4. Synch speeds out of synch
 

Proper Film exposure is Based on Four Factors ( S.A.F.E.)  
  •  Speed  ( Terms ASA, ISO, 100, 200, 400, 800 Higher)

  •  Aperture lens opening (F-Stops on camera)

  •  Film Characteristics  (Propensity toward certain colors)   Film Only

  •  Exposure Time or Shutter Speed  (Film only reciprocity)
 

Sunny F16 Rule:

  •  So you are out shooting film or digital and your cameras internal meter dies (The famous D2H problem), or the batteries go low and the meter in the camera is TKO and giving you the wrong numbers.

  •  How do we determine exposure?   The consummate professional uses the meter as a guide and then formulates the rest of the adjustments.  He always questions what the camera thinks it sees and knows when to make changes or override the system.

  •  To do this we must understand "Sunny f 16" rule. Simply put, the rule tells us on a bright sunny day to set your aperture at f 16 and convert the ASA or ISO film rating to the closest shutter speed.

  •  Lets say are shooting at ISO 100 on a real bright sunny day. Simply set the manual shutter speed for 125 sec as it is the closest speed to the ISO.  Again use the closest speed that matches the ISO.  Shoot at F16 if you have the subject as the predominate object in the picture. 

VARIABLES

  •  Lighter  subject:  Minus (-) one stop

  •  Dark subject:  Plus  (+) one stop

  •  The sunlight must be bright, no haze or heavy clouds for F16.

  •  If the light is from the side: (+) open up one stop to one and a half stops

  •  If the sun is behind the object plus. (+) two stops

  •  If the subject is reflective as on the water, use fill flash and cut back a stop.