Photograph Like a Thief

2 REVERSE ENGINEERING

Being able to look at pictures and reverse engineer, or break down, how they were lit is an incredibly useful skill. Determining how many light sources were used by examining the shadows, highlights, and catch lights and observing whether the light is soft or hard not only tests your knowledge and understanding of light, but also will help you to replicate looks and go on to create your own unique images.

In this chapter we’ll look at a number of images and by studying the clues, we’ll be able to pretty accurately say how each image was lit, how many lights were used, where the lights were positioned, and to some extent, ...