Tips & Tricks
Using Different Light Setups to Help You Tell a Story
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred thousand times already, and it’s something you already know.Lighting is important. Lighting can make a person look fantastic, years younger and pounds thinner, or it could have the opposite effect. Case in point, this image from our Lighting 101 Workshop DVD:
[REWIND: CONTROL LIGHT QUALITY IN FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY | LIGHTING 101]
Yes, light is important to make your subject look great (or not so great), but lighting can also be used to tell the story. Think about all the scary movies you’ve seen. Most, if not all of them are dark and shadowy, with eerie high-pitched music that builds the suspense until your heart is racing, and you want to cover your eyes. Suspenseful scenes are rarely set on the beach while the sun is shining, and birds are chirping (except for Jaws…and maybe Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Birds’). Anyhow, light in cinematography and photography can be a powerful tool to enhance the story you’re trying to convey.
In the following tutorial, Lighting With Story In Mind, Simon Cade of DSLR Guide gives many techniques to help you tell a story using lighting. Though the video is geared for filmmakers, much of what he shares is applicable to photography as well. He discusses four aspects of lighting that are important to consider: placement, intensity, color and quality with examples from popular movies demonstrating each.
This 10-minute video is the second in a series called, ‘Storytelling with Cinematography.’ The first video covers framing and composition to help tell the story and is also worth a watch. Both videos can be applied to cinematography and photography to create better stories for your viewer.
Equipment Used:
- Canon T3i
- Canon 40mm f/2.8
- Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 VC
- Zoom H5
- Rode NTG-2
- Fluorescent Head with PhotoSel 85W Full Spectrum
- Aputure HR-672
Watch Lighting – Storytelling with Cinematography
You can see diagrams from the video above as well as the first video at DSLR Guide’s blog post here and make sure you check them out on their website, Twitter, and Instagram.
[Via No Film School]
thanks for sharing this!
great article
Lighting is a dark art… :-D understand and learn how to control it and photos will improve massively…. so much cheaper than kit too..
hmmm.. 20% discount on the Lighting 101 tutorial…. marketing & salesmanship 101 possibly ;-)
Since a lot of lighting in photography is about shadows, I think you are right in that it is a dark art. :)
Lighting is definitely one of those areas in photography where it is true that it is not the equipment, but the photographer.
I fear that too many photographers struggle with decisions about bodies and lenses, when perhaps they would be better served by learning about lighting.
This, a thousand times this!! And I would add that you need to actually experiment with different light conditions, sizes, positions, colors, on different subjects, different skin colors, different face structures, etc. to actually understand whatta hell this is all about. If you just read about how light works and how it can effect your subject, trust me, you don´t know how light works and how it can effect your subject.
I am still trying to get my brain to understand the book “Light Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting”.
Light is complicated!
Much easier to argue about Megapickles. LoL
I agree completely. Early-on, I was so obsessed with the gear and the best glass possible. Now I spend a healthy amount of time planning the lighting more than so many other technical aspects.