Lighting Digital Field Guide

Chapter 7. Lighting Equipment

As you become more adept at reading and seeing light, you can create beautiful qualities of light whenever you want. Several tools and light modifiers exist to help you reach that goal. They allow you to manage the light, bend and shape it, change the quality or color, or soften or diffuse it so you can get the exact light you need to realize your vision for the shot. This chapter describes the tools you need when setting up a small home studio for portraits and products or creating a go-anywhere flash lighting kit. Some of these items may already be familiar to you, and if you have ever had a professional portrait taken in a studio you may recognize some of them from the photo session. You can make many of these tools yourself in some fashion or another and the Internet abounds with information to help you.

Shot in the studio for wildlife artist Ryan Wilhite, this image of a bronze bull elk sculpture utilizes several light-modifying tools, such as grids, gels, and softboxes to achieve the desired effect. Exposure: ISO 100, f/9, 1/100 second.

Light Modifiers

Light modifiers refer to anything that molds, bends, shapes, diffuses, colors, or reflects light. Studio pros and film crews have been using these tools forever to make light do what they want, when they want. When filming a movie, you can't wait for a sunny day, you have to create it. Light modifiers ...