Chapter 6: Working with Light
Light is the most important part of photography. Indeed, without light, photography wouldn’t even exist. The word photography is derived from two Greek words: photos (“light”) and graphos (“writing” or “painting”). Without light, there would be no way to physically record an image.
Not only is the availability of light a part of photography — the quality of light also affects your images. Light can be different colors; it can also be hard and directional, or so soft and diffused that it seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at all.
Working with and controlling light is how photographers produce images that are creative and unique.
Controlling the light is the key to setting the tone of your image.
Lighting Essentials
When light strikes a subject, it affects the way the image looks. The quality and the angle of the light, as well as the color, affect the tone or mood of the image, and the different qualities of light can cause the same subject to appear vastly different.
This section covers the two main types of lighting that are used by photographers and filmmakers today: soft and hard light.
Quality of light
Quality of light is a term photographers and filmmakers use to describe how light falls on and affects a scene. The two specific types of lighting are hard and soft. Both hard and soft light have their place in photography, and their ...
