How do you create moody light? How do you create light that’s inviting, or that feels futuristic, or that feels like sunlight? When should you use color? Where should you put your light? How many lights should you use?
Lighting can feel overwhelming, because it can seem endlessly complex. You can spend your whole life learning to look at light, making small tweaks, and creating subtle variations that create subtle psychological shifts in your scene. There can be infinite numbers of possible combinations of the number and type of lights, gels, diffusion, flags, reflectors, etc.
But, deep down, light is very simple. There are only seven ways to change light. There are only seven parameters that you can tweak. Light is like legos. Very simple pieces that you can build into endless diversity.
So, in this series of blog posts, we’ll pick apart the seven parameters you can use to control light. You’ll see that each parameter is simple and easy to understand on its own. So, by learning to pick apart and analyze each parameter on its own, we can turn complex systems into something as simple and fun as legos. And then we can build with freedom!
So, what are the seven parameters to control light?
1. Direction
Where you place the light (or how you place your subject in the light) has a profound affect on the mood of the image. It controls where the shadows fall, reveals texture, and creates a sense of three dimensionality.
2. Quality
The size of the light source relative to the subject affects the transition from highlight to shadow. A large light source creates a gradual transition; a small light source creates an abrupt transition. This is also known as the “softness” or “hardness” of the light.
3. Relative Intensity
How deep and black are your shadows relative to your highlights? We can use various tools to add or subtract light into the shadow regions to change the contrast of your scene.
4. Color
Is your scene warm or cool? Are there mixed light sources? Are you using colored gels or the white balance settings on your camera to manipulate color? Colored light becomes our paint, and the scene is our canvas.
5. Restricting Light
It’s extremely important to choose where light doesn’t go. There are many grip tools designed to block and cut light. We can create pools of shadow, shafts of light, or we can break up shadows into interesting patterns.
6. Refraction/Reflection
Rainbows, crystals, prisms, glass, water — there are many ways to bend your light in interesting ways.
7. Time
Cinematographers can use shutter angle to control motion blur. Photographers can freeze time with a flash, or blur time with a slow shutter speed. Or those two exposures can be blended together for crazy effects.
We’ll walk through each of these subjects in depth, in a series of short, easy to understand lessons.
*I first learned these seven parameters by reading the Strobist blog – which is an amazing lighting resource, especially if you’re a photographer working with small hotshoe flashes. If any of these posts get confusing, please read his Lighting 102 section. It’s a wealth of knowledge and David Hobby is a skilled writer and lighting educator that started me down this journey as a young photographer. But where he approached these lighting concepts with an emphasis on traveling light with small flashes, I’ll be focusing on grip tools and approaches that work equally well for photography and video.*
Remember that this Lighting series is all about “why.” Why do we put the light at this angle? Why do we use diffusion or bounce light?
The Grip section of this blog is all about “how.” How do we rig the diffusion material? How do we rig a reflector in place? How do we rig a flag to shape the shadows?
Use these two sections side by side, and you’ll have total control over light.
In conclusion, I want to share a lesson from one of my favorite musicians, bassist Victor Wooten. When asked about his approach to soloing and improvisation, he said that music is a language – he learns all the scales and chords and music theory so that it becomes internalized, like language. So that when it comes time to play, he isn’t thinking, he’s speaking.
“I would turn that question back to you – remember when I said music is a language? I get a lot of people that say, ‘I just don’t know how to improvise.’ And my answer is that you improvised that question. Unless you rehearsed it and you repeated it verbatim. You improvised it. So what were you thinking about? Were you thinking nouns? Pronouns? Did you count the syllables? How many conjunctions did you use? You know what I mean? You say what you feel — but it’s because your vocabulary is big enough, you have a lot to choose from. So musically, it’s about building up the vocabulary so big and so well that you don’t have to think about it anymore… So my goal is to not have to think about it… As much as possible, learn the rules, learn your theory, learn how to read – all that kinda stuff. Because it’s just like English, think about if you couldn’t read it.” -Victor Wooten, Bass Day 1998
Learning lighting is going to be the same way. All the technical stuff is going to take some work, the same way that spelling and sentence structure took work in elementary school. But, in the end, that understanding brings freedom. The art of lighting is also a language. And the end goal isn’t for us to reach technical proficiency, it’s for us to be able to say what we want to say.